What is Email Archiving, And Why Should You Care ?

When thinking of disaster recovery and compliance, we usually think of either some sort of backup mechanism or some sort of redundant infrastructure. But within certain areas of business continuity, there are applications that can serve multiple purposes while reducing costs and simplify management.

E-mail archiving systems are a perfect example of this.

Retention Policy Management

One of the biggest email-related problems that IT administrators have to deal with, is the constant and growing deluge of email that comes in. This massive flow of data needs to be properly sorted and stored without slowing down the server.

In order to accomplish this, IT administrators need to set retention and deletion policies. Old or inactive email needs to be regularly taken off of the server and moved to less expensive storage. This will free up more storage and allow the server to run more smoothly without the need for hardware upgrades.

Email archiving software allows you to automate this process. This saves time and money while reducing the possibility of technical problems resulting from human error.

End-users love these types of applications, because it allows them to work without being constrained by email quotas. Data that’s archived using an e-mail archiving system can still be accessed by the end user without having to go through IT. The data is still accessible, even though it’s off site.

Disaster Recovery

Email archiving systems also help to reduce backup windows by taking unchanging or inactive email data, and removing it from the back backup process.

Once you receive an e-mail, it will never change again. For this reason, you don’t need to back-up multiple versions of these files for point-in-time recovery. (This sort of backup process is more suited to “live” data such as spreadsheets, Word documents, databases, etc…)

Business Continuity

As data storage – and the cost of unplanned downtime – continues to grow at an exponential rate, recovery times are becoming a major factor when companies plan their disaster recovery process. Any downtime should be completely eliminated, or kept to a very bare minimum.

However, high availability systems can be very expensive. Not every company can afford remote emergency datacenters for failover purposes.

Since company emails are usually the most critical data that company has, it helps to have a system in place that makes sure this information can be quickly accessed… even in the events of the major disaster.

One of the great things about email archiving is that it allows users to access their archive, even if the primary email server is down. The archival emails are store offsite, in a location which is not affected by the incident.

Compliance

Regulatory compliance is becoming of increasing concern for companies.

Since data is growing so rapidly, the cost of a discovery requests is also rising as a result.

In order to minimize legal costs, it helps to have a massively powerful e-discovery system available on a rental basis as needed… to speed up searches. This can have a major impact on reducing legal costs in the event of an e-discovery request.

Another benefit of an e-mail archiving system is that it captures messages at the entry and exit points. This prevents internal sabotage of business data. This method of data capture makes it impossible for employees to delete or alter emails before they are backed up.

If your company is struggling with the costs of IT management, disaster recovery, business continuity, and regulatory compliance, you may want to consider implementing this type of system as a way of reducing costs and automate your e-mail management.

About The Author: Patrick Jobin from Storagepipe. They offers a wide range of backup software. Review their e-discovery services on Getapp.com