Email is by far the most commonly used method of communication between colleagues, clients, and customers. In fact, email is so popular that one study predicted that by 2021, almost 320 billion emails will be sent each day. That’s billion with a B. Every day.
Sending and receiving email is easy, inexpensive, and efficient. But storing emails for future reference or rediscovery is another matter entirely. Backing up your email system is great for disaster recovery, but for long-term, searchable retention, email archiving is a much better solution.
Email Archiving Is Different from Email Backup (and, Yes, You Need to Do Both)
Email backup and email archiving sound like pretty interchangeable terms, but they really serve very different purposes.
A backup is a periodic snapshot of your emails or data, which is primarily used for disaster recovery in the event your data is lost or damaged. Email archiving, meanwhile, is continuous. It doesn’t miss any email data that is not in use when the backup “snapshot” is taken that may be needed in the future.
Backups are helpful in the event of major data loss, but backing up large amounts of data puts a strain on storage infrastructure and can get really expensive. Archiving works with your backups to reduce storage strain and expenses and is intended for long-term retention.
10 Reasons Why You Need an Email Archiving Solution
Backing up your emails is a smart move for data recovery, but archiving your emails is genius level. Here are 10 reasons why:
1. Money Savings
On-site data storage gets expensive fast when you are backing up email. Given the volume of emails most enterprises generate, you are constantly adding capacity, which takes up space and requires maintenance.
When you archive email, you only pay for the storage you use. Additionally, data is deduped to reduce storage volume, which increases cost savings.
2. Time Savings
At some point, someone will be looking for specific information from an old email, and hunting down that information can be tedious. The Elkhorn Area School District was fed up with its traditional disk-based storage, so it switched to Arcserve Email Archiving. Archiving email let the IT team easily search and retrieve important emails quickly and eliminated the “per mailbox” payment model, which reduced the school district’s costs.
3. Improved Efficiency
Cloud-based email archiving streamlines archive management with a central hub for email retrieval and tracking key metrics. A simple interface means no skilled specialists are required to manage data backups.
4. Legal Protection
Email archiving tools ease some of the pressure of preserving old emails in case they are needed for litigation. Archiving lets you implement legal holds that ensure sensitive emails aren’t destroyed and capture emails in real time that relate to current litigation.
Some archive solutions let you tag and comment on emails, making them easily searchable for legal counsel during eDiscovery,
5. Compliance Requirements
Today’s global economy means there are always new regulations to navigate. BIR, one of Norway’s largest waste management companies, experienced this firsthand when GDPR was looming on the horizon. BIR’s existing backup solution was hard to manage, so the company switched to Arcserve UDP and Email Archiving.
Arcserve helped BIR streamline backups and archiving and adhere to industry-specific guidelines for archiving different kinds of data, such as searching and removing personal details from emails. With Arcserve’s help, BIR was reassured of its compliance with GDPR.
6. Business Intelligence
The increased searchability of email archives lets you access essential business information with a simple search. Search functionality also helps you identify and track insightful business data, such as which employee has the best contacts within a highly valuable client organization.
7. Simplified Lifecycle Management
As the economy recovers from 2020, we can expect to see a significant amount of turnover within organizations. Email archiving can help streamline employee offboarding by automatically removing email records when retention periods have expired.
8. Security
Enterprise-level organizations are popular targets for cybercrime, so security is always top of mind. An email archiving tool can help secure sensitive data by capturing and retaining emails as encrypted, unalterable corporate records the moment they are sent and received. This not only protects confidential conversations, but it also protects intellectual property by keeping IP from being lost and providing irrefutable proof that the IP belongs to your company.
9. Data Protection for Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Office 365 is hugely popular for business use. However, because of Microsoft’s shared responsibility model, Office 365 doesn’t provide long-term retention.
Archiving Microsoft Exchange emails not only gives you searchable email records for current employees, but it also lets you keep employees’ emails after they separate from the company, just in case they are needed for litigation.
10. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Replicating data between two sites ensures files and servers can be restored in the event of an outage at one site. In essence, email archiving provides a backup for your email backup.
Email files are archived off-site and away from the company network so they are protected from corruption in the event of a ransomware attack. And because the email archive is housed in the cloud, it is always accessible—anywhere, anytime.
Email archiving and backups are not equivalent, but they are both necessary to cover your bases for long-term retention and disaster recovery. Email archiving solutions help your organization maintain legal and regulatory compliance, save money, optimize storage, and improve performance.
