Virtual Appliance - Email Archiving, Electronic Discovery, and Data Leaks

Roger Matus, CEO of InBoxer, and I had a long conversation about deploying the InBoxer Anti-Risk software in the form of a virtual appliance. This virtual appliance is set up to serve the needs of organizations ranging from one to 5,000 employees. Why should you care? Organizations of all sizes doing business in the United States must comply with the electronic discovery requirements of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures. This means creating processes and procedures for email archiving and data leak protection Large and very large organizations have the expertise and staff to comply. Small and medium sized businesses (SMB) may not be able to comply. Roger expects the InBoxer Anti-Risk Virtual Appliance to be a solution that will be very attractive to SMBs and some large organizations. By offering the InBoxer solution encapsulated as a virtual appliance, InBoxer expects to offer the following benefits.

• Large organizations would be able to take advantage of purchasing and support agreements they already have in place when selecting the hardware platform for this software. It would be also possible to run multiple Anti-Risk Virtual Appliance instances on a single large system to reduce the costs in several areas.
• SMBs would be free to select a hardware platform that best fits their budget
• Resellers could add this product to their portfolio without having to learn new installation and update procedures.

Would a virtualized application, such as that being offered by InBoxer, be of interest to your organization? What's your take on virtual appliances as a whole? Is your organization using them?