Email archiving for businesses

Email is a primary means for communicating with people inside and outside your organization. Most of your customers use email to negotiate contracts and agreements, and exchange invoices and payment information. Very often, email messages are the only records of important transactions.

Unfortunately, many organizations underestimate the depth and breadth of information stored in their corporate email. According to Osterman Research, email contains nearly 75% of the information that individuals use on a daily basis. The amount of corporate knowledge stored in corporate email is enough to justify its safekeeping, but many organizations still find it hard to accept the need for an industrial-strength email archiving solution. After all, they point out, we always have backups.

It is not that simple.

Why should your business archive email?

The reasons for email archiving and management can vary widely by business focus. One certainty, however, is that a company never truly knows if and when the need for an old email trail will arise. It may simply be a good sales presentation and a list of qualified leads. It could also be a complicated legal issue that requires the company pay hefty fees and fines.

Traditional backup solutions that restore systems after a catastrophic outage are not really suitable for finding past emails. They are not easy to access, easy to search once made accessible, or safeguarded from tampering. With a quality email archiving solution, management and employees can easily search for old or deleted emails and retrieve them in minutes - without IT intervention or putting your backups at risk.

The volume of email generated on a daily basis creates quite a challenge for IT administrators. As employees send and receive more emails with larger attachments, storage space on the server starts running out. If server quotas can’t be increased, then emails must be stored in PST files on workstations or a network share, creating more IT headaches. With an email archiving solution, all emails are stored off the server while remaining easily accessible. The hassles associated with PST files simply go away.

Legislation in many countries has been amended to include email along with written or printed data in legal retention regulations. While legal and finance companies have very specific email compliance regulations, your business needs to consider its own email retention policy. The inability to produce an email trail when needed (e.g., evidence in a court case), could result in fines, court sanctions and loss of credibility. With an email archiving solution, all corporate email is stored safely in a tamper-proof environment and accessible within minutes. This makes it easier for your company to find valuable internal data, defend itself in a court of law, or simply prove compliance with applicable regulations.

Most companies do not monitor emails sent or received by their employees. Although corporate email should be used solely for company business, there are times when management may need to monitor employees’ email activity. With an email archiving solution, management can assign permissions for department heads to check on emails being sent by individuals. Should the unpleasant need for internal investigations arise, an email archiving solution ensures your company is prepared.

Email archiving is no longer a luxury. It’s a justified cost of doing business. It's an insurance policy against possible legal or compliance repercussions. Companies that use an archiving solution report that the benefits exceed their expectations in a number of ways.

There is considerable legislation and a growing number of compliance regulations that affect countless companies. The following links will provide you with a summary of legislation in particular countries. These are the regulations that stipulate, directly or indirectly:

• The need for email retention
• Who is affected by these regulations (and how)
• The penalties for non-compliance