An email archive is needed for the long-term, secure storage of emails to meet compliance requirements. When implementing a new email archiving solution, it is important to follow email archiving best practices and get things working correctly from the start. Time spent choosing the right solution that meets your needs will pay dividends in the long run.
Email Archiving Best Practices and Recommendations
The email archiving best practices listed below are intended to save you time and effort, and prevent problems selecting, setting up, and maintaining an email archive.
Choose a Solution that will Grow with your Business
If you are considering an on-premise archive, you will need to evaluate your current storage requirements and factor in how much your business is likely to grow and how your storage requirements may change over time. With cloud-based email archiving, this is less of a concern due to the scalability of the cloud. A cloud-based archive can adapt with your business as it grows. With ArcTitan, there is virtually no limit on storage space and the solution scales to 60,000 users. Your email storage space grows dynamically as your email data increases over time and you only pay for active mailboxes.
Choose an Email Archiving Solution that Supports All Email Data
Many email providers offer an archiving service, but they do not support a wide range of data types. If you use the Office 365 archive, you will likely experience problems importing legacy email data. ArcTitan supports a wide range of data types. You can import existing archive data from MS Exchange, Google Apps, EML, MBOX, MSG, or PST, you can export in several different formats, and you are not locked into proprietary data formats so there are no costly data conversions. You can easily move some or all of your data to other systems at any time if you so wish.
Seek Legal Advice
One of the most important best practices for email archiving is to seek legal advice and obtain up to date information on email retention periods and set your policies accordingly. Mistakes can prove to be very costly. Email retention requirements vary considerably from regulation to regulation and different retention periods apply to different types of data. For instance, if you are a HIPAA-covered entity, you will need to keep records about policies and compliance for 6 years, emails relating to the death of a patient for 2 years, and emails about a child’s healthcare until the child reaches 21 years of age. The email retention requirements for tax laws also vary depending on the type of tax, ranging from 3 years to 7 years in the United States.
Update Your Email Retention Policies Annually
Once you have set policies in your email archiving solution, you can relax safe in the knowledge that emails are being retained and you are compliant. However, laws do change, so it is important to regularly review your policies to ensure you remain compliant. Conduct an annual review of your email retention policies and ensure they are updated to take any regulatory changes into account.
Use Your Archive for Storing Other Important Data
It is useful to keep a range of data in an easy-to-search archive, but not all email archiving solutions allow you to store multiple data types. With ArcTitan, in addition to securely storing email messages, you can also store email attachments, calendars, contacts, notes, instant messages, and PST files. Whenever you need to access the data and retrieve it, you can do so quickly and easily via the intuitive, super-fast search screens or access the archive through your usual mail client (E.g. Outlook).
Automation is Your Friend
Many archiving services rely on manual processes, which means you need to set your policies, provide training to your employees, and hope that they follow your policies to the letter. That leaves a lot to chance. With ArcTitan, email archiving is made simple. ArcTitan archives all sent and received emails in real time, automating the whole process. Through automation, mistakes are eliminated, and no email will ever be lost. This automated approach and instant archiving of all emails will save a considerable amount of time and boost productivity. You can also set email retention policies to suit your needs, prevent the deletion of sensitive emails, and set policies to meet legal hold requirements.
ArcTitan Cloud – Easy Email Archiving for SMBs and Managed Service Providers
TitanHQ's cloud-based email archiving solution takes the stress out of implementing and maintaining an email archive. With ArcTitan Cloud, SMBs can quickly and easily implement their email archiving policy and start securely archiving their emails to meet federal, state, and industry regulations. ArcTitan meets all regulatory standards for email archiving and eDiscovery and serves as a black box flight recorder for your email.
ArcTitan deduplicates, indexes, and archives emails in real time and protects emails with end to end encryption from your email server to an IL5 -certified data center. All emails in the archive are protected against tampering with full tamper-proof access logs maintained and 100% protection against data loss with automatic backups of the archive performed for you.
ArcTitan is compatible with all mail servers, email services, and operating systems, including Office 365. ArcTitan enhances the email search and storage functionality of Office 365, eliminating the complexity and providing massive cost and time savings.
ArcTitan is lightning fast, with a load performance of over 200 emails per second from your email server along with fast search and instant retrieval of emails from the archive from desktop or mobile. ArcTitan searches more than 30 million emails a second, multiple searches can be performed simultaneously, messages and attachments can be searched in the same search, and search results can be viewed and email data exported in a variety of data formats, with easy restoration of messages to mailboxes.
ArcTitan is highly scalable, up to 60,000 users, with no limits on storage space in the cloud. There is a flexible and transparent pricing policy with a per live user subscription model - You do not end up paying for users who have left the company, but can still store their email data.
Managed Services Providers (MSPs) benefit from generous margins and ArcTitan can be supplied as a white label ready for MSPs to brand and sell as a hosted email archiving service. There are also multiple hosting options for service providers and APIs are supplied to allow seamless integration of the solution into your management systems.
If you need to start archiving emails, are unhappy with your current service provider, or you are an MSP that wants to add a hosted email archiving solution to your service stack to start generating regular, long-term monthly recurring revenue, call the TitanHQ team today to find out more about ArcTitan and book a no-obligation demo to see how simple it is to adopt email archiving best practices.