CONTINUITY: archiving email

Email has become the preferred method of business communication, and nearly every organization now depends on it for daily operation. Most workers today would find it hard to imagine how anyone could ever have been productive before it was possible to easily send and receive electronic messages over the network. It does even seem possible.

Given the critical nature of these bidirectional transmissions, it is safe to say that email is now perhaps the most important database for any company. Many do not recognize this, and look at email as just another standard, always-available business tool. The truth is that a collection of historical sent and received messages is actually a very large, expanding database of vital information that must be carefully kept, managed and protected.

Any loss or damage to this database would typically be a catastrophic occurrence, severely affecting ongoing productivity and posing a major risk toward business continuity.

Unfortunately, this data is not always stored collectively or in one place. Some users will copy down selected messages for saving on their local hard drives. Others might pack-rat large portions of email on the host server(s), exceeding storage quotas and creating an undue burden for the infrastructure. Then we have the users who delete everything and save nothing, the result being that vital correspondence for the record ends up being just hearsay.

The Need for Email Archiving

There are numerous reasons why a good email archiving solution is a key part of every successful IT strategy.

  1. Compliance and Discovery – companies are facing a growing list of regulations and eDiscovery requirements. This is especially true for healthcare, finance, legal and government entities.
  2. Business Continuity – data loss anywhere in an organization is damaging, but the lack of any functional email records could prove disastrous.
  3. Productivity and Efficiency – staff members can quickly and easily search email history without repeated listing, sorting or requesting assistance from IT. They can target more specific communication with enhanced criteria and find the needed information in less time.
  4. Freedom to Delete – sometimes it is difficult for users to delete messages, concerned about having a record of the important correspondence. This behavior leads to large mail folders that burden both local machine and hosted servers. A solid archiving solution allows for a leaner and meaner INBOX, which is good for both the employees and the IT infrastructure.
  5. Ditch the PST – no one wants to deal with the adventure that is an old and unruly Outlook PST file that prone to frequent corruption. While it might not eliminate the problem entirely, email archiving vastly reduces any dependence local data files.