Archiving is a systematic process of capturing every email that hits the mail server; preserving the flow of incoming, outgoing, or internal emails so that a single email or a group of emails, centered around a specific set of criteria, can be easily accessed and retrieved.
Most companies back up their email on the Microsoft Exchange server, which is the most popular email exchange server. It must be noted, however, that backup is not the same as archival. What backup does is to save a copy of your email for the purposes of restoring that information onto the server. Archiving on the other hand, gives your company the capability to store, discover and retrieve emails within seconds. There are many reasons why people opt for email archival. Three important ones are:
Compliance to Regulatory Requirements: Most companies, particularly those listed publicly are bound by regulatory guidelines to store all company data, including emails for a specified number of years. When asked, in a regulatory situation, this data must be produced with appropriate proofs of version control and datestamps. Since we already know that backup is not the same as archival, it might be extremely difficult to retrieve the required data easily, if you have not invested in an email archiving solution. You might end up spending a lot of money and resources unnecessarily, just because you are not able to pull out the right information from the right place.
Litigation and eDiscovery Compliance: The news is abuzz with recent scandals and lawsuits like the Virginia Tech, sexual harassment cases, fraudulent ponzi plans and so on. According to the Federal Rules of Civil procedure (FRCP), any company with a possibility of getting into litigation can be affected and needs to have proper eDicovery processes in place. Lawyers and IT staff find it increasingly difficult to find the right information in case of a litigation, if you do not have the right email archiving solution in place. Additionally, lawyers have to provide judges with detailed information on where the evidence data is stored and how accessible it was. Lack of a proper solution can render this process unachievable. It can then become challenging to serve the demands of law.
Storage Management: According to Gartner, 97% of all communication in today's business world is conducted via emails. Email is growing at a rate of 40% per year. This implies that Exchange server is being heavily used and that its data is growing now more than ever before. This can lead to poor performance of your email server. If you use a proper archiving tool, it will help you with this issue by lightning up the Exchange server for improved efficiency, performance, and better storage management. By configuring your Exchange server with an archiving solution to handle the email growth more effectively and efficiently, you will postpone the need to upgrade the Exchange server and, subsequently, increase the ROI on that Exchange server.
With so many advantages to Email Archiving, it is prudent for companies to invest in a good Email Archiving solution to ease out the demands on their email servers, meet their eDiscovery needs and adhere to regulatory compliance.
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