2006 to 2007: The Cloud drifts in. 

Picture a wet Tuesday morning in 2006 – somewhere between the first coffee and the 27th email of the day. Across enterprises worldwide, the first signs of the modern workplace hitting capacity start to appear. 

Exchange servers and file servers blinked red as storage neared capacity. PST files multiplied like rabbits as employees struggled to retain their data in usable form. The humble inbox, once a polite digital pigeonhole, had become a hoarder’s attic stuffed with contracts, cat memes, slide decks named “Final_v7_reallyFINAL2.ppt”, and the entire legal history of the company. IT engineers, their sleeves rolled up and high caffeine soft drink in hand, were losing the fight. 

That’s where our story begins: not with a bang, but with a “Mailbox Full” notification and a growing list of places you could put those emails. 

Back then, email wasn’t “in the Cloud.” It was very much in the cupboard. That cupboard was usually a room too small to be an office, with no temperature control or windows. Every organisation had one. It smelled of warm dust and the fear of the last IT engineer who attempted to untangle the spaghetti of Ethernet cables. 

Exchange 2003 was king. BlackBerry handsets buzzed and presented their owners with a physical keyboard. Laptops weighed about the same as a medium sized Bull Terrier. And the idea that you might have unlimited storage, provided as a service, sounded like science fiction. People had brutal quotas: 200MB if you were lucky and 500MB if you were management (or knew the Head of IT personally). 

So, users became archivists, smugglers, and digital survivalists. They exported mail into PST files and buried them on desktops, USB sticks and network drives named “Misc99”. Sometimes even CDs or DVDs. It was the compliance Wild West with little or no control over capacity planning, data integrity or corporate governance. 

While most vendors were busy selling bigger servers and shinier arrays, we were asking a different question. What if moving data safely, cleanly, at scale was the real problem to solve? We treated it like logistics. Not “buy more space,” but “move what matters, properly, to the best place for your needs”. 

Our focus was deceptively simple: migrate legacy archives, tidy the mess, make email manageable again. Less digital hoarding, more governance. Less archaeology, more architecture. At the time, it sounded almost boringly practical yet, years later, it would turn out to be prophetic. 

As these data challenges intensified, things were changing in the technology world which would forever alter the user’s experience in the modern workplace. Apple had just deposited the iPhone prototype into the world’s imagination. Gmail was casually offering gigabytes of storage like some sort of modern day technological Robin Hood. New options were becoming available.