Give your business an advantage with email archiving

Regardless of the size of your business, email archiving is definitely something you should consider. Obviously, it may be more beneficial for larger organizations that handle significant amounts of email correspondence, but that isn’t who it is restricted to. In fact, smaller businesses may also be able to realise tangible benefits from adopting an email archiving solution.

What is email archiving all about?

In today’s business environment, email has become the primary and the most important means of communication. However, many people don’t realise that every time they send or receive an email it adds a small burden to their company’s IT infrastructure.

This is why many free internet-based email services often restrict each user’s storage space. Otherwise, they would find themselves running out of server space very quickly. The same is true for business email systems which means people sometimes notice that their emails stop working once they reach their storage limit.

It is therefore important that you have a systematic approach to saving and protecting all the data that is contained in the emails that your company is sending and receiving. This is where email archiving comes into the equation. An email archive can either be created on internal business servers or via a cloud storage solution. Either way, the benefits are numerous.

Why is email archiving important?

The ubiquity of email as a communication medium has led to security and storage issues due to the fact that many businesses use email files for record keeping purposes. Since it is the main instrument for communication, most business correspondence such as sales transactions and purchase orders are sent through email.

Other information that is pertinent to the organization is also communicated through emails. As the amount of emails that your company is sending and receiving increases, you will need to have an efficient and effective management system in place to deal with all eventualities.

Compliance

One of the most important reasons why you need to archive your business emails is for compliance purposes. Legal cases may hinge on disputed email communications and being able to support your business’s standpoint with hard evidence is a must. This is why many businesses must comply with certain regulations which see them having to keep their email correspondence for certain periods of time.

Failure to comply could lead to penalties being imposed and huge amounts of financial damage caused by email dispute issues. Furthermore, there is also the damage that such incidents can have on a company’s image, brand and reputation.

Storage space

As mentioned previously, email numbers and server space increase exponentially. This is why the need to manage email correspondence effectively is something that every business should address. An effective archiving system such as Mimecast email archiving must be scalable to allow your business to cut on costs and storage space. For example, if you sent an email to all your employees, your email archive will not save every copy sent, but will instead keep just one that can be referred to by all relevant parties in the future. This will inevitably save on storage space.

Fast email recovery

You may encounter customers who are not keen on record keeping and may have misplaced their orders and are refusing to pay your company. Being able to retrieve emails relating to their transactions is therefore very important. An effective email archiving system will let you retrieve important emails immediately and within specific parameters.

Data management and security

An effective email archiving system will also help your company in managing the amount of data that you are receiving, thus preventing any important emails from being mislaid due to storage quotas. Email archiving also gives your company added security by keeping all the emails sent by your previous employees, even if they are no longer connected with your company.

By archiving emails, you also move them away from live IT environments. This means that they are inevitably more secure and more difficult to access by unscrupulous individuals such as hackers. This added security is an obvious benefit to your organization.

Hosted email archiving

There are basically two ways to adopt an email archiving system: buy an appliance that will capture all your emails onsite or invest in a hosted email archiving service online.

Having an onsite email-archiving server is perhaps more ideal for large companies that have their own IT departments. However, if you are a small to medium-sized business, you may want to consider a hosted email-archiving service that will take care of the email handling and management for you.