A few years back, the prevalent opinion was that email archiving was suited only to some businesses ‒ those organizations belonging to one of the several strictly regulated industries such as healthcare, government, education or financial services. Nowadays, it’s clear that every company can benefit from archiving email and other communications data. Even if you are a start-up or a small business, here are the top five reasons why your company should consider it.
1. Customer Records
While you may have records of customer orders, email and social media archiving provides an extra record of all your communication. A clear advantage is that you will be able to clear up any issues of miscommunication, confirm an agreement, use communication history as reference and monitor what’s going on your social media channels. Your archiving system will provide you with unlimited access to all your email and social media communication which you will be able to search and edit from a single source and have the peace of mind that nothing has been tampered with, lost or accidentally deleted.
2. Dedicated Servers
Your email server is not only in charge of sending and delivering your company emails, but is also tasked with storing them. The more employees you have, the more mailboxes there are for your server to store. The Radicati Group estimates that a typical corporate user sends and receives approximately 120 email messages a day. The size of an average email is about 75 KB. However, many of our business emails feature files, photos, drafts and all kinds of other attachments which can heavily affect this average. Pretty soon your company’s mailboxes will be teeming with messages, which puts a significant strain on your mail servers. Once you implement email archiving technology (which relies on a separate server), your mail servers will be relieved and able to run at full potential again.
3. Email Management and Retention Policies
Many companies have an email usage and management policy. It may regulate how emails are used to communicate with customers and things such as email attachments and deletion. Some policies used to entail a systematic deletion of emails to prevent cluttering and hitting storage capacities. Such a policy is unimaginable today, given the regulatory landscape and frequent horror stories involving the failure to respond to eDiscovery requests, where email can be used as evidence. Recent surveys indicate that as much as 75% of critical corporate information (including sensitive information) is contained in emails that employees exchange daily. No company can risk losing its critical emails, regardless of the size and sector it belongs to.
A policy that relies on email being backed up on employee computers is not satisfactory either. These backups have to be individually restored in order to be analyzed, which takes a long time and increases the risk of data corruption. With email archiving, your company emails will be stored safely in a single repository that select company members can manage and control. It will allow you to customize email retention policies and delete email and social media data automatically after some time.
4. Legal Requirements
In many countries, it has become a legal requirement to have an email archiving system in place. Even businesses that operate in unregulated industries might come to realize that there are some retention or privacy laws that they need to adhere to after all. Fines for businesses that are found to be in breach of such legislation are notoriously large. In addition, having your company’s name in newspapers or linked to non-compliance or evidence spoliation affairs and scandals might damage its reputation irreparably. Email archiving provides security for any business, large or small.
Even if regulatory compliance is not on your list of top priorities, remember that an email archive can be used as a fantastic knowledge base that holds vast corporate knowledge. Analyzing the email and social media data stored in it might help you reach conclusions and gain insight into your organization that you may not be able to get otherwise.
5. Superior Features
Small organizations in particular believe that the email platform they use (Gmail, Office 365, Exchange etc.) can solve their archiving needs with its built-in archiving and search features. That’s only because they’ve never experienced the magic of locating an important, yet elusive email in terabytes of data in a matter of seconds. Email archiving solutions possess incredible advanced search capabilities and boolean search, which enable to you to comb through your entire archive and pinpoint a specific message or attachment really quickly. For increased productivity, overall business security and a guaranteed quick eDiscovery response, every responsible organization needs to opt for a more robust and powerful email archiving tool.
Check out our latest infographic for even more reasons in favor of email and social media archiving. To learn how Jatheon can help you implement an email archiving solution, schedule a personal demo today.
