3 Essential Elements of All Good Business Email Archives

It is now mandatory for every business to archive their emails. If you haven’t yet considered email archiving here are a few quick reasons why you should:

• Legal Compliance: Every business must comply with Australian data retention laws, email must be a part of your policy.
• eDiscovery and the need for litigation support: If your organisation gets embroiled in a dispute it could be called on to quickly retrieve emails.
• Storage Management: The cost of storing increasing numbers of emails can place a heavy financial burden on a company.
• Preserving Corporate Data: It is not worth risking your company’s intellectual property over an inability to store data properly.

To help you choose the best email archiving solution, we’ve outlined the 3 main elements of good email archiving:

1) Easy to Use

There are three crucial areas for ease of use in an enterprise email archive:

• Initial Implementation: Your switch to a new email archiving system should be painless. An on-premise solution comes with the hassle of setting up the new systems for physical and digital requirements, making it both time consuming and expensive. The hosted solution simply involves choosing a vendor and starting your archive immediately.
• In Action: Retrieving emails is what the whole archive is designed to do and therefore the most important part of your archiving solution. Having a fast search system with data export features is an essential criterion in any vendor you choose. Many vendors are quite happy to demonstrate speed of their systems with a free trial.
• Ongoing Maintenance: This is not a worry if you choose a good third party provider but it does apply to an on-premise solution. A necessary consideration for an on-premise solution is the on-going costs of maintenance training for IT staff, patching and upgrading.

2) Robust

Reliability becomes entirely your domain when you use an on-premise system. Your archive will be located in your own internal data centre. This of course involves ensuring the security of the system you install, configurations, constant monitoring and building of the underlying infrastructure. If you choose to take this path make sure you have the initial capital ready to set it up and the staff to run it, which means employing more salaried workers for big companies or larger workloads for the current IT staff at smaller ones.

An outsourced option allows you to shift this entire burden to the vendor. Cloud email archiving has the advantage of an easily scalable infrastructure. While hosted options often struggle with service availability or on the converse, having large sections of unused space, most cloud storage vendors run a ‘pay for what you use’ system. This allows you to keep your costs strictly tied to the storage space and processing power you are using.

3) Secure and Private

To keep your data secure and private you need to consider security on three levels:

• Physical infrastructure
• Data encryption
• Application layer

Your data needs to be secure both online, in use and in its physical location. Whatever solution you choose you must remain compliant with all the data retention laws that apply to your industry. Ask your shortlist of vendors about their security measures at all three levels.

Long-term Budget Benefit

It is important that you choose the solution that is beneficial for more than just the immediate future. If you don’t have the initial capital to invest in your own hardware, software and the on-going maintenance/upkeep costs, a hosted solution would be much better suited to you. If you do have the initial capital a hosted solution could still be a better option. The hidden and unpredictable costs of running your own email archiving hardware can cause problems beyond your ability to fix, while the easily scalable hosted option is run by professionals dedicated to this particular field.

Choosing a cloud based email archive will allow you to

• Reduce storage and maintenance costs
• Reallocate or eliminate servers 
• Avoid compliance fees associated with data loss; and,
• Reduce the costs associated with eDiscovery and analysis

If you would like to read a more comprehensive review of cloud-based email archiving please click on the link below to download our free whitepaper.