Your company is growing exponentially, the volume of emails is quickly getting out of control and your system has become frustratingly slow. You’ve been told that email archiving is the answer to your company’s email woes. But what is it? And more importantly, why do I need it?
An email archive is a software program that stores your company’s emails either on an onsite server or in the cloud. There are plenty of reasons why email archiving is a good idea. This is my top 4:
Compliance
Compliance is the most important reason for archiving your company’s email. You wouldn’t want to risk a major financial impact to your company just because you can’t produce a vital email in a court case.
There are reportedly more than 10,000 compliance regulations around the world and there is a very high chance that your company will come under the jurisdiction of at least one of them. If your company is a multinational then it is likely you will have to comply with more than one law dictating what documents should be stored and for how long. An email archiving system allows you to set expiry dates on stored emails so you can balance compliance with not storing emails forever and using up valuable storage space.
If your company doesn’t archive its emails and you aren’t timely or can’t produce the necessary documents in a discovery request, you could be accused of spoliation and risk losing the case. You can read more about spoliation in my previous blog Spoliation will spoil your chances of winning your case.
Storage Space
If your enterprise is like most others, then your organisation is likely to have an insatiable appetite for more data storage space. The amount of storage space required by organisations has soared as we now operate almost exclusively in the digital world.
A good email archiving system will be scalable, saving your organisation storage space and therefore money. The size of the mail is reduced and just one copy of each email is saved. For example, if you send an email to 200 employees, not all 200 copies will be archived. You can learn more about the difference between archiving and email backup in my previous blog The lowdown on email backup vs archiving.
Fast searches
If you find yourself the recipient of an eDiscovery request, time is of the essence. It is now unacceptable in the eyes of a court to take months, or even years, to produce emails that support your case. If you receive an eDiscovery request, expect to be given just weeks, or possibly even days, to produce your evidence. Without a searchable email archiving system already in place, this request will likely be impossible to meet, not to mention it could be financially crippling, with scores of emails and documents that are potentially searchable.
You can read more about eDiscovery, your obligations and the latest trends at http://source.silverdane.com/
Data Management and Security
It’s estimated a quarter of companies see their data grow by one quarter each year. This can create a host of problems, from precious storage space being used up to quotas being enforced, the system slowing down and data and emails going missing.
An email archiving system can help ease the pain of an overburdened system and eliminate the need for data quotas, which reduces the chance of an important email being deleted.
When an employee leaves the company, their email account is closed and possibly their email history – your company’s data – disappears when they leave. But what if you need to find an email an ex-employee sent years ago? If you have a good email archiving system, it will still be safely stored with your company’s documents.
Archiving also means your company’s electronically stored information (ESI) is held in a central place, rather than across multiple computers and devices. It can be locked down so only a few staff are able to view the archived data, giving you peace of mind that your company’s information won’t fall into the wrong hands.
SilverDane’s flagship product SD Archive helps enterprises save valuable storage space and ensures your data is safe and you are compliant. Visit www.silverdane.com for more information.
