2021 Round-up

I hope you and your organisation have had a good year – at least better than the last one.

The world has been rocked by one crisis after another, and the pandemic has disrupted supply chains and caused a global chip shortage.

Fortunately, our customers have been able to rely on Cryoserver to keep running quietly in the background, archiving their organisations’ emails.

With many people still working remotely, our solution has been helping them find the important emails they need quickly. Cryoserver is also assisting employers in dealing with another consequence of working from home: “overemployment”, that is, people taking on second, secret jobs.

A new use for Cryoserver: preventing “overemployment”

Our solution helps HR to spot an unusual decline or increase in emails being sent from or received by a particular user. We also keep a record of all those emails.

HR can use these facts to deter employees from moonlighting. They can also identify someone who’s working at a second job in their first employer’s time and prove it to an employment tribunal.

Top IT stories of 2021

Some of us have had to tackle even bigger challenges this year, including:

• Accenture with its ransomware attack
• All the companies and US government agencies impacted by the SolarWinds hackers
• Facebook’s outage, caused by an engineering error “of our own making” (admits VP of Engineering and Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan)

Wasn’t it fascinating, at least for the rest of us, to learn about Facebook’s DNS and BGP breakdowns? With security passes rendered useless, engineers had to physically access data centres to fix the problem.

Facebook shows the value of email archiving

Also affected by Facebook’s outage was Instagram, some of whose employees were reported to have said the disruption was karma for the whistleblower ordeal that preceded it.

Frances Haugen’s revelations led to Facebook ordering employees to retain all internal communications and documents going back five years. The company was preparing for inquiries that had been launched by governments and legislative bodies.

If only Mr Zuckerberg had installed Cryoserver, he wouldn’t have to worry about email retention.

Then there were the Wall Street’s banks. In October, it was reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had opened an inquiry into how the banks keep track of employees' digital communications.

Fortunately, organisations that  have implemented Cryoserver will have copies of all their emails securely preserved for any investigation.

Welcome to our new customers

We’ve grown by about 28% in the last year, doubling new customer sign-ups since December 2020, thanks in part to businesses recovering from the pandemic.

Email usage keeps growing too, and we continue to see high volumes    319.6 billion being sent and received by our customers.

As you may know, one of the major trends in IT is the shift to as-a-service consumption.

319.6 billion
Estimated number of emails sent and received globally, per day, this year, according to Statista, who forecast it growing to 333.2 billion per day in 2022.

Cryoserver is part of this trend. Organisations are migrating to growing to 333.2 billion per cloud-based email and moving from their on-premises Cryoserver to our CryoCloud subscription service.

Product improvements

Our solution continues to evolve, and we’ve added six distinct enhancements for you and your users this year:

1.   An Outlook task pane and React UI – This is for Cryoserver.online, to help you find emails in your archive.

2.   An S3 storage add-in – It helps you to free up space on your local disk by moving archived email files to an S3 type store.

3.   OAuth authentication – for passwordless login to Office 365 / Azure.

4.   Export direct to PSTs from Cryoserver Cloud .online and on-premises solutions – This is in addition to PDF and .EML formats.

5.   OKTA – a cloud-based, multi-factor authentication service.

6.   More focused searches – Now, users can fine-tune their search in Current Folder, Sub Folders or all Folders

More kudos

Earlier this year, email utility software and solutions provider Exclaimer discontinued their email archiving solution. Cryoserver was a beneficiary of this, as Exclaimer kindly encouraged their archiving customers to migrate to us.

Then, in October, we had more welcome news from Digital.com, a leading independent review website for small business online tools, products, and services.They judged us to be a provider of the best email archiving software of 2021

Voted Top 10 again

We’d like to thank our customers and partners, who helped us end the year on a high. This December, Cryoserver was voted one of the Top 10 Cloud Vendors in Britain’s Reseller Choice Awards  –  for the third year running.

We are flattered to be recognised among these respected companies:

1. Microsoft
2. AWS
3. Datto
4. Acronis
5. Google
6. Connectwise
7. Cryoserver
8. Kaspersky
9. Sophos
10. VMWare

Looking ahead

We’re aiming to launch our Teams archiving module in 2022. This will enable Cryoserver to archive your organisation’s Teams chats without the need for third-party utilities.

On behalf of my team, I’d like to thank our customers for continuing to use our solution, and our partners for their loyal support, over the past year.

We wish you a happy Christmas and look forward to helping you have a prosperous 2022.