Email is one of the primary methods of communication for almost all organizations yet. Email archiving is one important task many organizations seem to overlook. Not only archiving your business emails is the best practice, it is often required by the regulatory bodies that govern your company.
The top five reasons for archiving email are:
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- Server Management
- Knowledge Management
- Employee Productivity
- Regulatory Compliance
- Litigation
Server Management
The key benefit to email archiving is the weight it lifts off of your company servers and your IT personnel. Being able to easily search, access, and retrieve this data can often be nearly impossible. Think of it this way: each employee gets 1gb of email storage, and each email server supports 1,000 users – that equals a total of 1tb (terabyte) of data. That much data on a server is possible, but it can significantly increase the chance of crashing, and will absolutely slow down performance overall. In addition, can you imagine if the worst case scenario occurred and the data was lost? It would take forever to restore 1tb of email data – effectively eating away at your hardware and your personnel.
Finally, if you are using an outside company to archive your emails, storage requirements can be significantly decreased and mailbox sizes reduced. This would decrease the time it would take employees to retrieve general emails from a storage software with direct access to a database of emails. Overall, email archiving decreases the physical load on the server, ensuring prime performance speed while lessening the likelihood of crashes.
Knowledge Management
Archiving email is important: it allows the company to proactively manage and store the data that their employees are producing. An email system can contain communications with customers, prospects, employees, etc. It also contains records of contacts and tasks generated by each person. It’s imperative that this information is secured, properly managed, and remains accessible for the entire company in an effort to maintain the reputation of the company in the long-term.
Employee Productivity
When you archive your company emails, you are now able to improve the productivity of your employees and your IT staff. Due to time or personnel constraints, it’s often difficult to find the time or the individual necessary to retrieve lost or deleted files within a company. Implementing an archiving solution within the business and allowing employees to access their own content, lightens the load on the IT department. It also increases the confidence of the employees that they are able to access their information without needing to bother others.
Regulatory Compliance
A very important reason for archiving is regulatory compliance. While all industries face some type of compliance obligation that regulates retention and production of business records, some industries face strict and sometimes onerous regulations (i.e. financial, healthcare, pharmaceutical, energy, etc.). The fact is, most industries face some level of regulatory obligation to protect business records.
Litigation
This is the reason most companies retain their emails and implement an email archiving solution. It’s always easier to prepare in advance for legal action than trying to act retroactively. Similarly, it provides transparency and allows the legal department to proactively spot and risk they might face with documentation or content.
Moreover, regulations come into play where legally documents must be retained for a period of time. Without an archiving solution, this practice would be manual, arduous, and costly. E-Discovery is another aspect of litigation; where electronic data can be requested in the event of a civil or criminal case. An email archiving solution enables you to properly index your company’s electronic data in an effort to make future retrieval simple while maintaining the integrity of the data itself.
A Comprehensive Solution
Jatheon Technologies is the creator of unstructured data archiving and social media monitoring solutions. We meet a wide range of both functional and compliance requirements across multiple industries and markets. Some of the markets we work with include businesses, government agencies, and other groups and organizations.
We help to properly and securely manage, store, index, and access unstructured communication data in a single repository. This communication data is critical for compliance, business productivity, reputation management, and many other needs.
