What Should Your Email Storage Software Include?

With billions of emails exchanged daily, it is no wonder that email makes such a significant portion of how organizations communicate. With so much valuable information stored in email, organizations turn to email storage software to manage and retrieve it. However, email storage software doesn’t just help with the storage of emails; a good email storage solution helps the organization meet a number of challenges including IT, business risk and legal compliance.

One of the key features email storage software should offer is the centralization of emails and attachments. The storage software interfaces with your mail server to automatically capture email and file it in a central email archiving system. This should be done in an efficient manner to minimize storage costs. The captured emails and their attachments are indexed so that the organization can conduct full text searches across the archive and the contents of attachments. A good solution would be able to index as many attachment formats as possible, as well as zip files and their contents, to ensure accuracy in the search results.

With emails stored in a central location it becomes possible to ensure that emails and their use comply with company policies and filters. Most organizations are mandated to store their email communications for a number of years that depend on the compliance and the regulations relevant to that organization and its industry. It is imperative that the email storage solution offers fast and accurate results, and allows its users to perform searches across one or more fields including attachment contents. Solid email storage software would provide Boolean search functionality to meet the need for highly targeted searches.

Apart from the legal aspect, email storage software offers benefits to the business by helping cut IT costs. A web-based UI that allows users to perform searches or retrieve documents for compliance or legal purposes frees up the IT staff’s time from searching and retrieving email. Secondly, by centralizing email communications, email storage software helps offload email servers, like Exchange, from the load – thus enabling faster email for the organization while offering administrators faster backup and restore times for Exchange. A related benefit is that such a good storage solution is more efficient in its storage of email. This means that valuable disk space on the mail server itself will be freed up, while at the same time the storage costs required to keep email communications for the number of years required by legal/industry/internal rules are reduced.

Without email storage software, organizations would tend to quickly run out of space on their mail server and resort to saving old emails in PST files. PST files are spread throughout the organization on individual employees’ computers making it a major, and slow, undertaking should the organization need to search email communications in response to a legal request, for example. Due to their distributed nature, PST files are a problem to backup in a central location – a problem exacerbated by the increasing use of laptops.

In conclusion, good email storage software reduces business risk by enabling an organization to enforce policies over the archived emails, reduce storage costs and enable more efficient IT.