Email archiving for businesses

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

Unfortunately, many organizations underestimate the depth and breadth of information that is 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 are still finding 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 email management can vary widely by business focus. What is certain is that a company can never know what email trail it will be called upon to produce at a future date for any reason. It may be as simple as a good sales presentation and a list of qualified leads or as thorny as a legal debate that could cost the company thousands of dollars in legal fees and fines.

Access to old and deleted emails

Traditional backup solutions that restore systems if you have a catastrophic outage are not really suitable for the purpose of finding past emails. They are not easy to access,nor easy to search once made accessible, nor safeguarded from tampering. With an email archiving solution management and employees can search for, and retrieve old or deleted email in minutes, without IT intervention or putting your backups at risk.

Storage problems

The volume of email generated on a daily basis is a problem for IT administrators. As employees send and receive more emails with larger attachments, storage space on the server starts running out. If server quotas are cannot 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 yet easily accessible. The problems associated with PST files simply go away.

Legal safeguard for email compliance

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, for example as 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, making it easier for that company to find valuable internal data, defend itself in a court of law or simply prove compliance with applicable regulations.

Ability to manage or monitor employee email

Most companies do not monitor what email is being 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 an employee's 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, with an email archiving solution your company will be ready.

Email archiving is no longer an expense but a justified cost of doing business. It's an insurance policy against possible legal or compliance repercussion. Companies that use an archiving solution report that the benefits surpass their expectations in a number of unexpected ways.

There is an enormous amount of legislation, and a growing number of compliance regulations that organizations need to be aware of. It is beyond the scope of this document to list each one here, however, 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; and the penalties at risk for non-compliance.

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