We all know by now that using Exchange on its own is no longer sufficient to meet your email archiving commitments.  There are third party vendors out there who sell software solution specifically designed to help you with this burden.

These may help, and be ideal for your situation, but it still leaves you with an expensive outlay for the software and hardware, licensing and support of the system.  If you have a system, you need a support infrastructure, building or rackspace and ongoing costs like leases, rent and power.

That's not to say they don't work, or are unworkable because they do and aren't.  They are perfectly suitable to some situation, and for companies who like to exert more control over their affairs. But like with anything there is a cost.

You also have to consider compatibility with your existing systems.  It is essential that the solution you have interfaces directly with your mail system, like an 'archive exchange' symbiosis.  There are many more systems out there than just Exchange and whatever tools you use to store your mails has to be compatible with your mail solution.

Buying your own archiving solution also brings scalability into the equation.  If your business grows, will your systems be able to grow with them?  Will the archive still be fast enough when it is near capacity, and how easily can you add more capacity?

One of the most oft overlooked issues when dealing with archiving and archive compliance is the thorny issue of retention rules.  If you are setting up a new solution yourself, or with a third party vendor, setting up your retention rules takes an inordinate amount of planning and execution.  It is widely accepted that you should use your businesses existing policies and adapt them to your new archiving system, but it is still time consuming to put into place.

Many third party vendors will offer to take care of the hardware as well as the software in a maintenance contract.  This can be useful if your business is fluid and likely to expand.  Adding scalability to your systems can be expensive and time consuming so it is often easier to let the vendor take care of it for you.  Although this option is the easiest to manage it is also the expensive one.  Hardware isn't cheap and neither is the support of the hardware.  You will end up paying a premium for this kind of service, but it does offer more peace of mind.

Most 'onsite' archiving solutions involve licensing of some kind.  This will be a rolling expense, most likely on a yearly basis, in most cases a ballpark figure is 20% of the purchase price per year.  This is a significant expenditure that needs to be factored in to any cost estimates.

This kind of email archiving solution is a viable and useful one for companies that want to keep things on site and relatively under their control.  It does have its downsides that need to be considered before going with this type of setup.