We are already aware that email archives are precious for business continuity, legal discovery and staying in line with email compliance regulations. A lot of companies have recently abandoned their in-house archives and flocked towards the cloud. Cloud services are apps and programs that run offsite and are provided by third-party service providers. They’re becoming commonplace for use in small businesses and there’s also a growing online backup industry that can back up email archives online.
But what are businesses sacrificing when they dump their hardware and move online? Can we really trust the cloud with something as precious as an email archive? What kind of security does the cloud really have? If you’re thinking of moving your archived data to a hosted solution, here are some important considerations.
Accessibility of Cloud Email Archiving Solutions
Early adopters were fast to praise the positives of the cloud, like instant access and automation. However, working in the cloud has significant drawbacks. The first drawback is the accessibility of data. The email archive stored in the cloud by a third party is accessible by you but also the third party staff. Most privacy policies grant them permission to work with your private data as they deem necessary. The intentions of most cloud email archiving companies are good, but it can take just one bad employee to breach your confidentiality. By keeping email archiving in-house, you can vet employees and monitor access yourself.
The intentions of #cloud email archiving companies are good, but it takes only one bad employee to breach your confidentiality. #EmailArchiving #Business Click To TweetCloud Email Archive Stability
The most recent newsworthy events must be a warning: how many times have you read about a Google mail outage or a Dropbox security breach? Third-party cloud email archives are susceptible to these outages. The loss of access to email archives can be very damaging to a business, especially if it happens when there’s pending litigation or an external audit.
Emails are to be stored securely under compliance laws for a reason. They contain crucial and often sensitive communications that can be damaging to personal and corporate security. With an onsite email archive, security is only as strong as the weakest link. In a cloud email archive, you’re adding a lot more links to that chain. Weak links in a cloud archive means a heightened risk of having confidential data exposed.
With an onsite email archive, security is only as strong as the weakest link. In a cloud #email archive, you’re adding a lot more links to that chain. #EmailArchiving #CyberSecurity Click To TweetIn time, cloud services providers have come to understand the security-related challenges and have been investing a lot of time, effort and money into removing the roadblocks. This definitely made cloud security less of an issue. Before making the final decision, your business should ensure that your cloud services provider has adopted all the necessary security certifications and features such as encryption, data loss protection and ISO 27001 security standard.
Cost-Effectiveness
The ever-present idea that cloud-based archiving solutions are much more cost-effective than the on-premise might not be fully true after all. However, studies show that a growing number of organizations are allocating as much as 50% of their IT budget to the cloud, while large enterprises still remain faithful to their on-premise setups.
Before cloud technology, email archiving required significant investment, especially for SMEs. Organizations needed to purchase, install and maintain the pricey hardware solutions. Today, smaller businesses that lack the IT infrastructure to support in-house solutions can pay a fixed monthly fee per user and avoid the hefty initial costs.
Jatheon has been a leader in on-premise archiving for more than a decade and is currently building the most advanced and secure cloud email archiving solution on the market. To get a better idea of how email archiving began and what’s coming next, read this guide on the history of archiving. To learn more about our solutions, contact us or schedule your personal demo.
