For a majority of businesses, email is still the number one method for communication and sharing data. As an essential element of your team’s daily workflow, it is important to understand why you need a proper email archiving solution in place.
The practise of archiving emails for later use in a safe and searchable manner gives your business an advantage over simply deleting such valuable data. Deciding which solution to use can be expensive, require expert knowledge and be difficult to use on a much larger scale without the appropriate support.
Therefore, it is definitely worth considering what you currently know about email archiving, how your business is deploying this strategy and where there are areas to improve on.
Is there really a need for it?
As businesses around the world have adopted a work-from-home attitude, especially with the uncertainties of Covid, it is expected that email use will only continue to increase. But how valuable are your old emails and what are the benefits of storing them?
Regardless of size, your business sends out hundreds of emails per week, if not thousands. There are typically two options for storage. You can either store your business emails in ‘the cloud’ or an on-premise server. The goal here is to have them safely tucked away in a secure environment so that they can be searched and audited with ease at a moment’s notice.
Below we’ve outlined a few reasons why it’s important to archive emails;
- Knowledge management
- Storage management
- Compliance and auditing needs
- Disaster recovery
- Mail server performance
- Litigation and legal holds
Is this an in-house task or job for an outsourced IT company?
While your in-house team could tackle this task, it would then eat away at the time they have to focus on other important admin tasks that are vital to the day-to-day operations of your company.
Outsourcing this task could save your admin team valuable hours to be used elsewhere. But the biggest benefit of all will be knowing that you have a team of highly skilled and certified engineers available 24/7/365 to tackle any hiccups.
Ensuring compliance
If you were to take a moment and look at any one of the emails you or your team have sent out you could easily pin-point high-value data neither you nor your customers would want to lose.
Ranging from email correspondence between organisations, invoices, financial documents as well as personal data – you are going to want to ensure you are complying with GDPR to the T. Should your business not be compliant with GDPR you may find yourself at the risk of receiving a heavy fine. In such instances, you would rather be able to report that you have the correct systems in place and followed appropriate protocols to prevent such IT disasters from happening than to say you had no measures in place at all.
Email encryption
As important as it is to ensure that all data held by your business is properly encrypted and stored, you should also take extra precautions with sending sensitive data via email. Although you may be sending it to a secure recipient, you are not in control of their network or even who that data may be shared with. By using an encryption method which protects your business and requires authentication on the recipients behalf, you help protect your sensitive data from potential data breaches.
Email retention policies and best practise
Each industry will be governed by a separate set of regulations with regards to email retention and archiving. For example; standard business correspondence should be appropriately stored for a minimum of 1 year. Financial, legal and contract items may require longer storage periods of 5 to 10 years. To best optimise your email archiving solution we highly recommend utilising a Email Retention Policy (ERP) which will provide a best-practise procedure to follow as well as legal protection should your business have to provide proof of email communication, or for governmental regulation purposes.
On-Premise vs Cloud Email Archiving
Storing data using cloud technology is becoming an increasingly easy fix solution for businesses as it significantly lowers your costs as cloud-based solutions are often less expensive, can improve security and performance all around. Eliminating the need to keep large volumes of emails on email servers, reducing the costs of hardware on-site as well as maintenance. You will also be able to perform e-discovery searches and find archived emails within seconds utilising rapid search tools.
Our Managed Cloud Services offer the best of both worlds with purely private or public, as well as hybrid cloud technology. Ideal for stabilising your infrastructure, organising a migration of data, or simply enhancing your current storage methods, we want to ensure you get the most out of your cloud investment.
Conclusion
With mounting pressures to continuously evolve, improve your flexibility and get a tighter grip on that monthly budget, it is certainly worth considering outsourcing this task. Ensure that your critical email data, context and corporate memory is retained and kept secure. Get in touch with our high-experienced team on +44 203 034 2244 or +1 323 984 8908. Alternately, you can contact us online. We will be happy to help you overcome your IT challenges. Our friendly team will help guide you through your options and will help ensure that you get the right IT Outsourcing contract for your organisational needs. We have engineering bases in the United Kingdom, Europe and Southern California and our group of highly experienced engineers are available 24/7 to assist and ensure that your business’ IT infrastructure is running seamlessly.
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