Monday, anti-virus software vendor Symantec announced their acquisition of LiveOffice, cloud archiving and storage vendor. While being best known for their anti-virus and spam protection software, Symantec has also had a long history of suites for general computer maintenance and providing software infrastructure. This acquisition adds yet another reason to combine security with communication and archiving.

In their joint statement, Symantec and LiveOffice reveal how useful it is for a business to go with a single vendor for their communication and teamwork solutions. This is also the point where the cloud can be extremely useful for a multitude of business models because it allows them to offload e-mail servers and other infrastructure into the cloud which also removes the need for the overhead of in-house servers.

Another issue discovered by many businesses and e-mail is the need for archives. A multitude of different countries have specific requirements for business communications and regulate how long they’re stored, how they’re stored, and asks that they remain accessible for external agencies to audit the business. For example corporations and businesses may need to comply with regulations from FINRA, SEC and SRO. As a result, businesses are asked to keep expensive systems to archive their e-mail communications in order to remain in business.

LiveOffice keeps this covered with their hybrid cloud-service by not just archiving e-mail and past communications for a company using their service, but they do so in a manner that takes into account the regulatory necessity when archiving.

The other side of archived material isn’t just about staying on the right side of the law, but also keeping track of the evolution of projects inside the company. Many companies archive their e-mail and communications just out of necessity so that they don’t lose a great deal of useful documentation if they cannot find it in their files. A cloud-based outfit like LiveOffice vended through Symantec would essentially make short work of this by archiving-as-you-go during communication.

With cloud-based services, archiving is made easy and backups are literally instantaneous (as well as sorting and etc.) as they can be designed to both save locally and into the cloud as they’re sent out. This means that if the local backups are burned in a catastrophe, they’re still available offsite. This also means that remote and mobile users connected to the same vendor do not have far to go in order to get access to a timeline.

Being able to pull up all of the communication for a particular project, link it to assets of that project, and view them remotely (without having to pull them all across the network) could speed up offsite individuals and remote collaboration.

Plugging Into Pre-Existing Services

Looking at the Symantec solution, one interesting thing is that it hooks up with pre-existing cloud-based services such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Dropbox. Since these are all extremely popular services and people have already used them, this means that they won’t need to suddenly shift to a new interface or service just because the company switched to LiveOffice.

By acting as man-in-the-middle, LiveOffice can be used to plug into already existing usage of these services and back up information sent to them. It’s also been mentioned—back to the regulatory archiving—that if enterprise users send documents out to these services, via LiveOffice, that those documents can be retained in the format they’re sent out for later use in legal or regulatory matters.

All of this without disrupting the collaboration and communication capabilities of the users.

It looks like LiveOffice is managing to position themselves well by getting acquired and Symantec is positioning themselves as a cloud-enabled enterprise vendor for communication software that will enable businesses to keep doing what they’re doing but stop worrying as much about being able to access backups and or what they need to do in order to stay complaint with data regulations.

All of these things greatly reduce disruption on the workforce while also enabling the power of storage-as-a-service in the enterprise sector.