Why does your organization need an email archiving solution?

If your organization uses an in-house mail server, an email archiving solution is the only way to take full advantage of the information contained within company emails while simultaneously reducing the amount of storage space required to maintain the messages. Archiving the ingoing and outgoing emails and attachments being sent to and from your employees, also allows you to retain copies in a central location as needed for continuity and compliance, in a manner that provides for future access as needed. It is therefore very important to choose an email archiving solution to improve your company’s knowledge base and address compliance issues by providing swift access to company information, while reducing storage requirements for the files.

Knowledge Base

Both internal correspondence and external email messages contain a wealth of information, which your organization can exploit in a number of ways through the use of data mining in an email archive. Customer support emails can be used as the basis for an expert system, for example, and provide both common examples of customer inquiries and evaluate the most effective responses to those questions. Technical support departments, in particular, can use previously resolved support requests as a basis for future troubleshooting guides when the information is made available by a robust archival system.

Compliance Issues

A well-indexed email archiving solution allows your business to not only demonstrate compliance with all email-related business regulations, but also to produce company correspondence if necessary. Current business regulations, such as the FRCP and HIPPA, create specific requirements for companies that correspond with customers via email. In order to prove compliance with these regulations, in the event of a complaint or audit, your organization must be able to produce copies of individual emails sent to customers. In addition, both sent and received email can be subpoenaed during a lawsuit. When a set of documents is requested through the court system, your organization must be able to quickly and accurately produce a large volume of historical communications data by searching and accessing the email archives, instead of combing through the email accounts of individual users.

Storage Requirements

Without an email archiving system in place, your organization must store emails both on the server and on the computers of individual employees when the messages are downloaded. Although system backups can protect the emails from accidental deletion, this method of email management is both inefficient and redundant.

Your organization can reduce redundancy and speed up your email server with an automatic archival process. Each un-archived email takes up space and slows retrieval and processing on the mail server, as well as the local computer. Automatically archiving email files on a regular schedule ensures that electronic correspondence is removed from the main server to make space for new files. Email archiving improves the response time of the server, while still allowing access to the individual messages when necessary.

Although frequent backups can prevent data loss, and retaining email messages on individual workstations allows your organization to retrieve emails, archival is a better solution. The combination of swift access to files, with a more efficient storage system and the availability of a pool of information for a knowledge base, makes an email archiving solution the only method of storage that provides a comprehensive answer to the challenges posed by an in-house mail server.

This guest post was provided by Victoria Nicks on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. More information: GFI email archiving solution.

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