Secure email archiving is a smart move for any business. It offers a host of benefits that allow you to meet compliance regulations and retain important data without increasing email bandwidth, as well as saving you money, bringing you peace of mind, and streamlining email management. Without secure email archiving, you’re likely eventually to find yourself in a predicament that could be costly.
Benefits of Secure Email Archiving
By securely archiving your email, you are able to reap many benefits that will improve your business operations and enable efficient scaling. Here are some of the main ones.
Data Retention
Your business probably sends and receives thousands of emails every week, and, much of the time, there is critical information in these emails that is worth retaining. However, keeping them onsite and within each employee’s email just isn’t sustainable. A searchable archive can help. You’ll be able to find emails sent or received by employees, past and present.
Should an incident occur — this could be anything from a possible data breach, to a partner seeking out urgent details for a project — you’ll simply be able to log into your email cloud server and search. Plus, all the data will be encrypted and safe.
Meet Regulatory Compliance Requirements
If you are in a highly regulated industry, such as healthcare or finance, you have additional rules to follow regarding communications. Email archiving helps you to meet these regulatory requirements, giving you a virtual record to draw upon in the event of an audit. With this approach, you’ll be able to fulfill the regulations of HIPAA, FRCP, SOX, FINRA, GLB, NYSE, NASD, SEC, and other bodies.
Cloud Integration and Backup
Most businesses use Microsoft 365 for email hosting, which means their email files are stored automatically in the Microsoft 365 cloud. However, they are not backed up for restoration purposes. so just using the platform alone doesn’t preserve data in the long term. By adding an archiving integration to Microsoft 365, emails are archived automatically and indefinitely. There’s no extra work for your team!
Protect Your Intellectual Property
Emails can contain all types of intellectual property (IP) and should always be safeguarded. Email archiving offers you this advantage. Capture every email as it is sent or received, and achieve an accurate repository with no data loss.
Recover Deleted Emails
Whether by mistake or purposefully, emails often get deleted. These emails may contain critical or sensitive information. The unfortunate reality is that many of your users partake in risky behavior, so it never hurts to have a backup in place.
Legal Discovery
Should you find yourself subjected to a lawsuit, email archiving can be a powerful tool when it comes to discovery obligations, as you are able to quickly search emails and find messages related to your case. Doing this manually would be costly and time-consuming.
Improved Productivity
If your servers are currently bogged with email data, it can be a grueling and slow process to search for a specific email. Additionally, when email inboxes grow too large, employees often must spend time deleting emails or moving them to another area. This is not efficient and hinders productivity. When you provide your team access to a searchable archive, they can find what they need in seconds, and won’t need to engage your IT staff in the process.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Do you have a plan for email in the event of a disaster? If all your email sits on a physical, onsite server, you could be wiped out should a catastrophic event occur. But when email archives are in the cloud, your email is safe, allowing you to access information and keep your business running as usual.
Questions About Email Archiving
While all these benefits sound amazing, you may still have more questions about how email archiving actually works. You may believe it will place an undue burden on you. However, when you work with an email archiving partner, you’ll be able to implement this with ease.
Email archiving lives in the cloud, so there’s no cost for additional hardware. It’s rather easy to set up with no pressure on your internal staff. Plus, you’ll enjoy 24/7 customer support and almost 100% uptime.
Email archiving is becoming an essential practice for any size business, and by leveraging it, you can reap many benefits that allow your business to grow and scale. Learn more about the fundamentals of email archiving.
Kirsten Barta
Kirsten Barta is Sr Marketing Communications Manager at Intermedia
July 24, 2024
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