Every business relies on email as a primary communications channel. And yet, many organizations don’t have a plan in place to safeguard the frequently critical information that is communicated via email.
An automated archiving solution can do just that.
Archiving email has a variety of benefits for companies. It enhances the security of email, and even protects deleted emails. In our Insider Risk Report, we found that 57% of respondents had deleted email from their business account—emails that could contain sensitive or confidential information.
Let’s look at how email archiving works and why you should employ this as part of security protocols.
What is Email Archiving?
Email archiving involves the storing of emails in their original state, along with the ability to easily access them via a robust search. In certain situations, email archiving may be a regulatory requirement. In the case of litigation or an audit, you’ll need to be able to access and produce this virtual paper trail.
How Does Email Archiving Work?
Your archive is stored in a secure cloud environment. An automated system extracts emails and their attachments from each exchange account activated for archiving. The contents of each email is held in a tamper-proof cloud and can be recalled using advanced search tools.
Benefits of Archiving Your Email
As part of your Exchange or Office 365 platform, you can seamlessly archive emails from any number of users. An archiving solution should include these features:
- Regulatory compliance FRCP, SEC, GLBA, HIPPA, HITECH, and SOC
- 100% data capture no matter the device or platform, including POP/IMAP accounts
- Encryption of data both in-transit and at-rest
- Searching, filtering, and tagging functionality
- Exportable content in a variety of formats, including HTML and PDF
- Unlimited storage for easy scalability
These features integrate email archiving with your email exchange system, ensuring total portability and security.
Compliance with Statutory Regulations
Meeting compliance requirements for email is a serious responsibility for your business. Your document retention policy should include email. Storing them via archiving helps meet compliance needs while also ensuring quick retrieval.
Support for Legal Matters
Should your organization become involved in any legal proceeding, litigation discovery will be part of the process. Without an email archive, the cost of retrieving data could be heavier than the litigation itself.
In the event of an audit or other investigation, email archives ensure that content is not altered and offers support during a legal situation.
Increased Productivity
What’s your process if an email is deleted that held information that you now need? Without an email archive, retrieval, if possible, could be time-intensive and costly. It can also take your employees away from doing their jobs. Whereas with an archive, your employees can quickly find what they need and carry on with their work.
Data Insights
Archiving your email can also provide you with analytics that can be helpful moving forward. This is especially true for sales and customer service emails. You can look to your archive to understand response rates as well as issues that customers experience. You can then make improvements in processes, approaches, and products.
Improved Storage Management
Did you know, according to an email statistics report, daily sent email figures will reach 293 billion in 2019? Chances are, your employees are sending dozens, if not more, emails every day.
That’s a tremendous amount of data putting significant pressure on your email server. This can hinder your system from performing as it should. By moving a large amount of this data to an email archive, you can alleviate this strain. It also allows for faster retrieval, and reduction of downtime.
Cost Reduction
By using a cloud email archive solution, you’ll reduce the costs associated with storage and IT maintenance. This cost minimization is especially true when you partner with a third-party email service provider. You’ll have the opportunity to pick the email archive solution that works best for your company based on the number of users and the functionality you desire.
Upkeep of your email archiving cloud-based server will no longer be the duty of your IT team. This means they can focus on many other critical initiatives.
Email Account Accessibility During Personnel Changes
When employees leave, where do their emails go? Are they accessible for the new team member in the role, or for other colleagues?
It’s likely there is useful information in these email accounts. Email archiving ensures that this useful information is not lost. New hires can search for relevant data while other employees can locate information relating to the status of projects, discussions with customers, and more.
Email archiving is a smart move for your business – now and in the future. To find out more, simply contact our email experts.
Kirsten Barta
Kirsten Barta is Sr Marketing Communications Manager at Intermedia
November 13, 2019
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