Email Archiving Solutions and their Advantages
Email Archiving has gained prominence in recent times owing to the increased usage of email as an important corporate communication mechanism. Archiving is a process of capturing and preserving the flow of all incoming, outgoing and internal emails so that any email can be easily retrieved, when required, based on specific search criteria.
Most companies back up their email on the Microsoft Exchange server, which is the most popular email exchange server. It must be noted, however, that backup is not the same as archival. What backup does is to save a copy of your email for the purposes of restoring that information onto the server. Archiving on the other hand, gives your company the capability to store, discover and retrieve emails within seconds. There are many reasons why people opt for email archival. Three important ones are:
Compliance to Regulatory Requirements: Most companies, particularly those listed publicly are bound by regulatory guidelines to store all company data, including emails for a specified number of years. When asked, in a regulatory situation, this data must be produced with appropriate proofs of version control and datestamps. Since we already know that backup is not the same as archival, it might be extremely difficult to retrieve the required data easily, if you have not invested in an email archiving solution. You might end up spending a lot of money and resources unnecessarily, just because you are not able to pull out the right information from the right place.
eDiscovery Needs: We have all heard of recent scandals and lawsuits e.g. Virginia Tech, sexual harassment cases, fraudulent ponzi schemes and so on. Discovery of emails can be a difficult process for lawyers and IT staff alike. According to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), any company with the possibility of getting into litigation is impacted. Also lawyers are required to inform judges about where the evidence data is, how its stored, and how accessible it is. So if you dont have the right solution in place, it can become challenging and sometimes impossible to serve such demands by court of law.
Management of Exchange Server Storage: Emails are growing at a rate of 40% per year. In fact, 97% of all official communication in companies is conducted via email, according to a Gartner survey report. As a result of this, there is an increased pressure on your company’s Microsoft Exchange server, and it is handling more data than ever, which may end up with poor performance of the server. You can easily resolve this problem by investing in a good email archiving solution, which helps lighten up the server for improved efficiency, performance and better storage management. Configure your email server with an archiving solution to handle email growth more effectively and postpone the need to upgrade the Exchange server. This results in increased ROI on that Exchange server and better storage management for your company.
With so many advantages to Email Archiving, it is prudent for companies to invest in a good Email Archiving solution to ease out the demands on their email servers, meet their eDiscovery needs and adhere to regulatory compliance.
Get more details about Email Archiving and Email Archiving Solutions at email archiving