Email archiving solutions help businesses to keep a record of electronic data sent and received from their users. Across a number of industries – like legal, accounting, real estate and financial services, to name just a few – they are a requirement to achieve compliance and should be used to minimise legal and reputational threats to organisations.
As email volumes continue to explode, in-house archiving solutions are rapidly becoming the less favoured option for businesses. Organisations are turning to cloud-based archiving solutions, which provide a wealth of advantages:
1. Avoid the problems of handling archiving in house – with cloud-based archiving, email is automatically backed up without the need for an IT resource in-house. Hardware compatibility issues, ongoing maintenance and regular upgrades become a thing of the past.
2. Email kept forensically intact – it is not possible to tamper with or alter email that has been archived in any way meaning in the event of an audit or litigation, your electronic trail is 100 percent complete.
3. Lower and more predictable costs – not only can cloud based solutions be deployed rapidly, but they also have low upfront costs and predictable per user per month fees. A local solution, on the other hand, is likely to mean an initial investment that starts in the tens of thousands of dollars.
4. Lightning fast search and discovery – your email archive is not something that belongs locked away in a cupboard gathering dust. It should be a treasure trove of searchable and retrievable business intelligence at your fingertips. You can discover past emails or past documents in a matter of seconds.
5. Accessible from anywhere in the world – you can access your email archive anywhere meaning it is a much more flexible solution. The only thing you need is an internet connection.
6. Unlimited data backup – although email volumes are exploding, this should not affect your email archiving solution. Your archive grows with you.
7. Guaranteed uptime – when you turn to a cloud subscription based model you get the benefits of guaranteed performance through a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Unlike local solutions being prone to power failures, hardware failures or other outages, cloud-based solutions have far greater redundancy.
8. Captures all email (outgoing, incoming, internal and even those deleted) – local solutions typically back up email on a nightly or weekly basis. This means that emails that have been deleted might not get backed up. With cloud solutions you get 100 percent email capture.
9. Individual or global settings – you can let your staff have access to their own archives or alternatively give specific people access to the company wide archive. This is great for retrieving email from past employees for example.
10. Iron-clad security – data security used to be the number one resistance to cloud solutions. Nowadays it is widely acknowledged that cloud solutions are typically far more secure than local solutions.
Businesses who back up their email should be evaluating email archiving in the cloud as a viable, cost-effective, and value-adding option to ensure compliance and provide a wealth of business intelligence at their fingertips.
