Email Archiving vs. Email Journaling – Which One Do You Need?

It has become a priority for businesses in many industries to strictly adhere to retention standards and to have a complete grasp of the electronic storage process. Being aware of this process might help a company decide if it’s adequately prepared to satisfy compliance criteria.

When it comes to email retention, the question is not whether you should do it but rather how to do it.

Knowing the difference between email journaling vs. email archiving is critical to making a decision on which solution you should implement in order to stay compliant with the retention requirements in your industry.

While it may initially appear that archiving and journaling are relatively the same, they are, in reality, distinct procedures with different implications for your day-to-day business operations.

What email journaling and email archiving have in common

A lot. Both archiving and journaling keep copies of email communications for risk management and compliance. They also help organizations manage email storage and reduce storage costs. Additionally, both tools can be used for ediscovery – the process in which electronic communications need to be located and presented as evidence in HR disputes or in court.

However, email archiving and journaling differ when it comes to how email is archived and stored. Organizations need to understand both options to determine which one best meets their needs

The definition of email journaling

Email journaling creates shadow copies of all message traffic and records all communications in an organization’s email retention plan. It can be understood as a method of recording the organization’s entire communication.

This makes it a good tool for simple retention regulations since organizations must keep records of conversations in order to fulfill regulatory and compliance requirements.

Pros and cons of email journaling

Email journaling systems provide historical email access, aiding in internal investigations and investigations by third parties. With email journaling, emails are accessible for ediscovery requests, subpoenas, or other legal requests.

Email journaling systems have search capabilities, allowing for quick keyword searches of all incoming and outgoing messages.

An obvious downside is that journaling systems can cause a backlog since everything is duplicated and kept indefinitely.

Depending on the quantity of metadata in a message (attachments, images, etc.), this may lead your servers to get clogged with duplicate content, resulting in substantial system performance setbacks and extending the time necessary for record reviews.

Most email journaling providers have a mix of blanket journaling options, which allow for the journaling of all messages to and from all mailboxes on a server, and granular options, which allow the scope to be reduced to specific departments, elements, or persons.

The definition of email archiving

While email journaling refers to the copying of communications as a way of electronically keeping compliance, archiving of electronically stored information explicitly refers to the capacity to shift a message from one data store to another.

Archiving solutions archive emails in the most secure manner possible. They transfer and safeguard just one copy of the email immediately after it has been sent or received.

This enables your business to gather, protect, and store massive volumes of email in a centralized location, where it can be quickly searched for ediscovery or audited to verify corporate compliance.

Most crucially, the archiving solution preserves the data in a way that cannot be manipulated or destroyed, in accordance with the restrictions of your organization’s retention policy.

This ensures that your organization can submit any essential information in the event of litigation or open records requests.

With all this in mind, it’s easy to understand why email archiving is now more common for organizations that require a secure repository for historical and current email records. Modern cloud email archiving solutions can also serve as backup solutions.

Compliance

Email archiving systems are used to assist organizations in regulated industries to meet strict format and retention requirements mandated by various federal and state laws, as well as newer data protection and privacy legislation. Some of these are:

• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)
• FINRA / Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 17a-4
• National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) 3010 and 3110
• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)
• The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• Patriot Act
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
• Japan’s Personal Information Protection Act
• Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD)

Why email archiving is a better option than journaling

Companies in heavily regulated industries, such as financial services, must adhere to various data retention regulations. These regulations govern how email records must be secured, stored, and archived, and failure to comply with these regulations can incur massive fines.

In such industries, an email archiving solution is regarded as the best approach to preserve compliance.

This is because the data copied in an email journaling solution will continue to accumulate until the journal inbox is full. When this happens, most solutions are intended to save the data in PST files, which are accessible and corruptible by outside sources.

The copies of your information can also raise the likelihood that the archived material is tampered with or altered, causing catastrophic harm to business and personal reputations.

While the use of email journaling is intended to make it easier for your organization to stay compliant, the double storage of all your data exposes you to the types of risks it is intended to prevent.

Unlike journaling electronic communications, which make numerous copies of the same data, archived messages use single instance storage and deduplication. This implies that even if a message was sent or received across many accounts, only one copy would be saved.

Essentially, the information is instantly transported to a lockbox, where it will remain safe until it is required to be recalled, whether for legal or other reasons.

Furthermore, no matter how many times the information is passed along through other accounts, the metadata within the message will not be duplicated.

Over to you

With the right guidance, finding a solution to store your data is not a difficult undertaking. We’ve been focusing on archiving, ediscovery, and compliance since the beginning of Jatheon.

You may pick an on-premise, virtual or cloud archiving solution that matches your needs, regardless of the complexity or size of your organization.

Capture, store, index, and archive all of your data, then distribute it to a single repository so you can quickly find what you need.

Our cutting-edge email archiving technology can minimize storage expenses, server load, and the associated expenditure for email backups. It will enable you to instantly access and search massive volumes of emails and electronic documents for ediscovery and compliance.

Contact us or book a free demo to find out more about how Jatheon can support your compliance and ediscovery needs.