Email archiving for network administrators

The exponential growth of email, coupled with its growing importance as a business communication tool, makes it a high impact business resource. While eEmail compliance is the responsibility of management and the legal department, IT personnel and network administrators must decide how to manage and store an ever-increasing volume of data.

According to Osterman Research, three out of five companies consider the growth in email storage to be a major concern. One terabyte of data today will increase to 2.5 terabytes in just three years. That is a lot of data to handle. Network administrators understand that without a good email archiving and management solution they risk storage problems at Exchange Server level; difficulty in retrieving emails from backup; and more and more complaints from users whose emails, saved as PST files, are lost or no longer accessible.

Email archiving will solve your problems.

Solving the storage problem, eliminate mailbox quotas

Mailbox quotas are a daily problem for administrators. Needed to prevent the mail server from running out of space, quotas force employees to delete email in order to conserve space. Employees are reluctant to delete potentially useful email and petition for more storage space. It's a constant source of tension. With an email archiving solution, however, your company saves disk space and gives your employees access to all of their old email with just a few clicks. An archiving solution will put an end to Mailbox Full messages and the constant struggle for email disk space.

Retrieving old and deleted email

Without an archiving solution, going through backups to find old and deleted emails can be a nightmare. Your network administrator wastes precious time trawling through volumes of old data looking for emails that no one can specify for certain exactly when they were sent or received.

With email archiving, the administrators can give an employee, either through a web-browser or through his or her Outlook client , access to all old and deleted emails. He or she will have the ability to search for particular conversations and to restore emails with a few clicks, without need for administrative intervention.

Losing emails when retention periods are reached

To save on storage space, administrators configure email retention policies on the email server. When the policy limit is reached, old emails are deleted. Without first archiving, potentially important email will be lost. Employees, who were under the impression that their email was safely stored in their inboxes are, understandably, upset to find they were in fact deleted when the retention period ran out. While retrieval is possible from backups, it is time-consuming and requires precise knowledge in order to locate the particular conversation. With email archiving, the process of retrieving old email is streamlined; your employees can do it, without administrative intervention, from their desktop or from the web.

Pains of PST management

To avoid the problem of deleted emails, many users save their email to PST files which are stored on their local machine or on a network share. This approach is problematic. If stored locally, PST files may not be backed up regularly. If they are subsequently damaged or deleted, then the email is lost. For example, if there is an operating system issue that requires a reformat of the hard disk, PST files may be deleted in the process, especially if, in the moment of crisis, no one thinks to remember the PST files are there. On the other hand, if PST files are stored on the network share, administrators are once again faced with the battle over storage requirements; as well as the need to increase the number of backups; and the overhead of managing all those PST files.

With an email archiving solution in place, these issues simply go away.

The solution

GFI MailArchiver™ is a great way to keep management and employees happy (and present fewer problems for the administrator). This email archiving solution is easy to configure and use and ships at a price that even the most budget-conscious finance director will find hard to turn away.

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