Archive2Azure leverages technology from the company’s flagship solution to migrate Office 365 mailbox archives, but is a fundamentally different type of solution, designed for the rest of the data beyond the mailboxes, so companies can get rid of their legacy on-prem storage completely.

New York-base Archive360, which makes archive migration software for Office 365 that fully satisfies compliance requirements, has announced Archive2Azure. It is a complementary solution to their flagship Archive2Anywhere solution, and is designed for the rest of customers’ unstructured data that isn’t in active employee mailboxes.

“We are positioning this as the second leg of our first product, a complementary addition to Archive2Anywhere,” said Bill Tolson, Vice-President of Marketing at Archive360. “This is the first regulatory compliance storage solution for Azure. It is targeted at gray data – data companies may not know they have. It comes from many sources. It includes compliance data that has aged but which corporate legal departments still don’t want to delete, systems generated data like log files, which in many cases aren’t even managed, and data from inactive employees. This data isn’t known to the company, and it isn’t indexed, but it has potential importance, for discovery and other purposes.”

Tolson said that while companies migrate their active mailboxes and their archives, all this secondary data slows down their complete move to the cloud.

“The issue becomes, can we move it up to Azure and keep it there inexpensively?” he asked. “This is data that sits around and gets backed up regularly, so the cost of not managing it is very high.”

Archive2Azure is designed to move – in a legally defensible manner – all this secondary data to the Azure cloud, and thus allow the organization to completely eliminate on premise file systems, legacy email archives, and free-range PSTs.

“Our value proposition overall with this is helping companies speed their move to the cloud, by moving this data that isn’t adaptable to an Office 365 mailbox, but which should be kept,” Tolson said. “That gray, inactive lower-value data goes to a place where it can be centrally managed and accessed.”

Archive2Azure is fully integrated with Azure Search and offers search on demand with policy-driven data scoping. Integration with Power BI provides a scalable native eDiscovery engine with integrated analytics.

“Archive2Azure can migrate that data up into Azure and track data points on what goes up there,” Tolson said. “That means that when a need arises to access that data, our on-demand custom indexing provides easy access.”

“This is a fundamentally different product from Archive2Anywhere, but it uses things from it,” said Bob DeSteno, Archive360’s CEO and Co-Founder. “Think of it as Iron Mountain for digital records.

“We built this due to client demand,” DeSteno added. “Email is only 15 to 20 per cent of the digital record, and companies need to do something with the rest, so they can move stale data and inactive users.”

Archive2Azure currently offers a total of 11 connectors, with the road map set to add more every quarter. These include connectors for MessageOne, AXS-One (both EML and Lotus Notes), MX Logic, ArchiveOne/C2C and Gwava.

“Customers started to move to the cloud, but there wasn’t a way to move all the data,” Tolson said. “Now with Archive2Azure, we have addressed the next step for all this unstructured data. This is the first solution designed as a repository for unstructured data in the Microsoft cloud, and Azure’s lower cost drives the price down compared to enterprise class storage. For the customer, this this lowers the cost dramatically while also lowering the risk.”

Archive2Azure is offered as a subscription model without start-up or cancellation fees. No additional hardware is required and the professional services installation is free of charge.

The Archive2Azure solution is Microsoft Azure Certified. It will be available on July I through Archive360’s partner network.