It is evident that email archiving has become vital in today’s business environment, but what is email archiving and what is its importance to businesses?
What Email Archiving is
An email archive is a store for old emails which are not needed on a day to day basis but may need to be accessed from time to time. An email archive saves all email conversations securely in a searchable format that allows companies to satisfy various state, federal, and industry requirements.
Saving Storage Space with Email Archiving
Although emails could be left in personal mailboxes, the number of emails received on a daily basis means the storage space required for each mailbox would be considerable. This is especially the case considering the requirement in many industries to store emails for several years. If this approach was used, employees would have to exercise strict control over their inboxes and mailbox folders and diligently deleted spam and non-official emails. Even with these terms, storage space would still likely become an issue in a short space of time.
Emails are Easily Searchable in Archives
Another common solution to preserve emails is a mailbox backup. Email backups can be used to recover emails that have been accidentally deleted and can even allow an entire mailbox to be restored in the event of a disaster.
However, as is the case with any store, knowing that an item is in storage does not mean it is necessarily easy to find. While you may need to invest a little time to find a particular item in your work storeroom, it can take awfully long time to find a single email in an email backup containing thousands or even tens of thousands of messages. The reason behind this; backups are not searchable.
An email archive differs from a backup as messages can be searched due to them being indexed. Finding a message in a backup file can take hours, even days. However, locating a message in an archive takes a matter of seconds, a minute or two at most. An email archive allows emails to be quickly found if it is ever required to produce them.
Usually, IT staff have much more important things to be working on than recovering accidentally deleted emails. An archive means an email can be easily searched and accessed by employees without any involvement from the IT department. What’s more, emails can be accessed from any location and emails found even when the mail server is down, if a cloud-based archive is used.
Of course, there are also situations when more formal searches are required, such as when issues are identified with an employee and HR needs further information on the matter. Legal requests from eDiscovery require large quantities of emails to be resurfaced and provided to attorneys, also customer disputes require email conversations to be found quickly. Having an archive within the business significantly reduces the time taken for these tasks to be performed. A company-wide search of emails takes 80% less time, typically, when an archive is used.
Importance of Email Archives for GDPR Compliance
Since the General Data Protection Regulation has come into effect in May of 2018, email archives are even more critical. As soon as a request is received from an individual who wants to exercise their right to be forgotten, all data must be erased. This, of course, includes data contained in email accounts. An email archive can make this process much more efficient by allowing emails to easily be found and deleted.
The email archive ensures that regardless of what may happen, all emails can be located. Emails in the archive are also court admissible and tamper-evident which makes email archives important for compliance with state, federal, and industry regulations.
Email Archive: Time and Money Saver for Companies
Improvement in mail service efficiency, reduction in server management costs, minimised storage costs; these are results of using an email archiving system in your business. Companies can save up to 75% on storage space when an archive is used. Additionally, it is a much quicker process to migrate emails to a new server when the majority of emails have been placed in an archive.
Overall, an email archiving system’s importance to businesses cannot be underestimated. It ensures emails are never lost or deleted, provides a failsafe in the event of disaster, maintains an audit trail and and ensures emails can be found quickly and efficiently. An email archive can save companies time, money, along with helping compliance with state, federal, and industry regulations.
ArcTitan: An Efficient, Low Cost Solution to Email Archiving for Businesses
For businesses who have not yet started using an email archiving solution, TitanHQ has an optimal solution. ArcTitan is a fast, efficient, scalable, and low-cost archiving solution for SMBs and enterprises.
A cloud-based email archiving solution that integrates seamlessly with Outlook, ArcTitan allows emails to be quickly archived and retrieved on demand with ease via super-fast, user-friendly search screens.
Storage space is reduced through the de-duplication and compression of all emails and all messages and attachments are stored securely in IL5 certified datacenters.
If you are searching for an easy-to-use email archiving solution that can be implemented in minutes, get in touch with the TitanHQ team today for further information.