Email
Archive : Why is it required ?
In
Now a day, If your organization / company uses an in-house mail
server, an email archiving solution is the only way to take full
advantage of the information contained within company emails while
simultaneously reducing the amount of storage space required to
maintain the messages. Archiving the ingoing and outgoing emails and
attachments being sent to and from your employees, also allows you to
retain copies in a central location as needed for continuity and
compliance, in a manner that provides for future access as needed. It
is therefore very important to choose an email archiving solution to
improve your company’s knowledge base and address compliance
issues by providing swift access to company information, while
reducing storage requirements for the files.
The
reasons a company may opt to implement an email archiving solution
include protection of mission critical data, to meet retention and
supervision requirements of applicable regulations, and for
e-discovery purposes. It is predicted that the email archiving market
will grow from nearly $2.1 billion in 2009 to over $5.1 billion in
2013.
Email
Archiving Solutions :
Compliance
:
Compliance
is rapidly becoming a must-have requirement for many companies. The
US is leading this trend, but the rest of the world is following and
it will eventually become the norm.
A
well-indexed email archiving solution allows your business to not
only demonstrate compliance with all email-related business
regulations, but also to produce company correspondence if necessary.
Current business regulations, such as the FRCP and HIPPA, create
specific requirements for companies that correspond with customers
via email. In order to prove compliance with these regulations, in
the event of a complaint or audit, your organization must be able to
produce copies of individual emails sent to customers. In addition,
both sent and received email can be subpoenaed during a lawsuit. When
a set of documents is requested through the court system, your
organization must be able to quickly and accurately produce a large
volume of historical communications data by searching and accessing
the email archives, instead of combing through the email accounts of
individual users.
Storage
Requirements :
Without
an email archiving system in place, your organization must store
emails both on the server and on the computers of individual
employees when the messages are downloaded. Although system backups
can protect the emails from accidental deletion, this method of email
management is both inefficient and redundant.
Your
organization can reduce redundancy and speed up your email server
with an automatic archival process. Each un-archived email takes up
space and slows retrieval and processing on the mail server, as well
as the local computer. Automatically archiving email files on a
regular schedule ensures that electronic correspondence is removed
from the main server to make space for new files. Email archiving
improves the response time of the server, while still allowing access
to the individual messages when necessary.
Although
frequent backups can prevent data loss, and retaining email messages
on individual workstations allows your organization to retrieve
emails, archival is a better solution. The combination of swift
access to files, with a more efficient storage system and the
availability of a pool of information for a knowledge base, makes an
email archiving solution the only method of storage that provides a
comprehensive answer to the challenges posed by an in-house mail
server.
Discovery
:
Having
recognized the business value of email, and implemented policies to
retain and archive it as required, organizations will need to search
this email for a number of different business purposes such as
internal audits, HR requests and compliance supervision.
At
the simplest level, most archiving solutions provide a basic search
and retrieval capability for data that has been captured and retained
within their archive.
However,
data captured within the archive may represent only a subset of all
available data, so more advanced Information Management solutions
provide wider search capabilities that can locate and search all
email within an organization, wherever it is located – in an
archive, in Exchange, or stored in PST files.
PST
Management :
Users
may have moved email from their live mailbox out into ‘personal
folders’ (otherwise known as PST files) stored locally. They might
have used the ‘Auto Archive’ feature in Outlook to reduce the
size of their mailbox, or they could be using local folders as a
convenient way to store and organize their older email.
Although
they are in wide use across many organizations, PST files create a
number of problems for IT administrators. From a technical
perspective they are not a good way to store valuable data for the
longer term as the PST is not a robust file format and is easily
corrupted.
These
files can be stored almost anywhere – typically on end user devices
or network. Although IT administrators know these files exist, they
are unlikely to know exactly how many they have within their
organization or where they are. As a result they will be taking up a
considerable amount of storage and incurring costs, but are probably
not being backed up on a managed basis and therefore are liable to be
lost or misplaced.
These
files can be stored almost anywhere – typically on end user devices
or network. Although IT administrators know these files exist, they
are unlikely to know exactly how many they have within their
organization or where they are. As a result they will be taking up a
considerable amount of storage and incurring costs, but are probably
not being backed up on a managed basis and therefore are liable to be
lost or misplaced.
We
have seen that archiving provides a reliable and robust alternative
approach to long-term email storage, and many archiving solutions
provide the ability to ingest existing data from PST files. This will
allow organizations to eliminate the use of PST files completely.
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—Pradeep Gupta
—Pradeep Gupta
