This guide is aimed at giving you a complete end-to-end understanding of-
Email archiving (Verb): Keeping a read-only copy of every mail sent and received by your users in a digital vault.
Email archiving ensures that a copy of every mail sent and received is stored in a separate archival store.
The massive volume, variety, and velocity of emails transacted by modern businesses make it vital to have an email archiving strategy to protect this critical data.
The archive should be robust, secure, and search-ready to support regulatory compliance, litigation readiness, storage management, information availability, data backup, and business continuity use cases.
An email archiving solution ensures that all emails are collected and stored centrally before they are delivered to users.
Benefits of having a central email archive are-
An email archiving solution can save your business time and money by collecting and storing all emails centrally.
By keeping only recent mails on the live storage and moving older mails to secondary storage, you can improve the mail server and endpoint performance due to reduced sync times and quicker searches.
This also simplifies email data management. For example, suppose you have a primary mailbox that you are accessing via MS Outlook and a secondary mailbox that is your archive account.
Enterprises need to back up email data necessary for future reference and regulatory compliance.
To ensure the safety of email data, many elements are required, such as backup strategy, backup tools, backup storage, redundancy, and a way out in case the backup itself fails.
An excellent email archiving platform will store your data in chronological order on the centralized archive in a search-ready form.
In our conversations with hundreds of decision-makers in enterprises across industries and sizes, the following requirements showed up as expectations from a modern email archiving system:
The common thread across the outcomes is the need to make email archival a mainstream day-to-day application to boost users’ productivity and make the accumulated data more beneficial to the organization.
By 2019, 75% of organizations will treat archived data as an active and “nearline” data source, and not simply as a separate repository to be viewed or searched periodically, up from less than 10% today. – Gartner
There is a massive growth in email data. Most businesses have been managing the data in-house so far.
It takes a good deal of hard work and deployment of substantial resources to create in-house infrastructure, which is dependable by design and delivers an uptime upward of 99.9%.
In addition, planning a backup of the archived data and a disaster recovery system for this infrastructure are fairly involved projects.
You would typically need to design scale into your infrastructure from the start and provision extra capacity in advance to be ready for the growth.
Ensuring security is no trivial task and requires specialized teams and resources investment.
Securing an ever-growing volume of data requires a robust security infrastructure, a 24/7 vigilance system with a drive towards achieving sustainable cyber resilience.
This whole stack would need regular upkeep, hygiene, and 24/7 monitoring to ensure consistent performance and reliability.
This would involve automated monitoring to ensure service and infrastructure uptime, a 24/7 NOC team to respond to these alerts, and a management team to run a routine cleanup and other maintenance jobs.
The entire project can be expensive since you have to budget and procure compute and storage for 1-2 years of projected use.
This makes it clear that there is no point in struggling with short-term solutions. Switching to cloud-based archival platforms delivers safe, secure, and manageable data.
Related:
Here are three email archival options for you to choose from:
With SaaS email archiving, subscribe, configure and consume the services. No infrastructure or management is required at your end except an Internet connection to access and transport mail from the primary mail servers to the archival service on the cloud.
For a Private Cloud Email Archive, set up a server and storage on a private cloud, in your cloud account, and install the chosen email archiving software on it.
The instance type and storage capacity will depend on the number of users and the retention period. Manage the archival set-up on the cloud on an ongoing basis.
For on-premise email archiving, provision server and storage infrastructure on premise (bare metal or virtualized). Next, deploy the Archiving software on this infrastructure and configure it for high availability and security.
Archiving your data on a separate operational infrastructure is a smart move that can give you an extra layer of protection. Additionally, knowing that you have a backup copy of your data can help you feel more confident about trimming your primary mail platform for efficiency.
The cloud platform provides a reliable and high-performance infrastructure to support the archival application.
The cloud storage infrastructure is the safest storage platform available today. With guaranteed uptime and extremely high durability, you are assured that your data is safe on the cloud. There is no need to maintain backup copies, making it a convenient solution for long-term storage.
The most crucial piece of technology here is elastic storage, which gives immense flexibility to scale automatically on demand. There is a deliberate movement of IT workloads to the cloud, and for a good reason.
SLAs provided by a cloud service provider give organizations guarantees on the performance of the service, thereby creating a legal agreement.
Mostly your e-documents are all over the various devices you use. An email archiving solution saves the day by having all you need at one spot to save you from the hassle of finding them at different spots. The emails are stored and collected centrally before they are delivered to the user. Learn more.
Your data is constantly growing. It is a massive task to access information on demand without contacting the IT helpdesk to access age-old data.
An email archiving solution has a self-help portal for easy access by the end user. It boosts productivity and eliminates the hassle of multiple contacts to retrieve your data.
SMBs can access the ediscovery tool to locate analytics and business intelligence vault.
Simple features like- new leads, new accounts, customer appreciation, and customer feedback can be accessed through ediscovery.
An excellent archival platform will expose API to allow you to integrate email archiving and e-discovery with other business systems.
As you may be aware, Office 365, Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange Server, Exchange Online, Zimbra, Lotus Notes, etc., are some of the most widely used enterprise email services today.
Used by organizations, both large and small alike, they also tend to rely on their built-in email archiving capabilities for eDiscovery and compliance.
If you are considering moving or have already migrated to them, you should know that their in-built features may not suffice your enterprise’s email archiving needs.
Vaultastic was built around your vision or ideal state to cater to what enterprises and businesses were looking for.
Is only a safe backup of all the data to help the business improve its bottom line, topline, or operations?
Here is where the other part of the vision kicks in, where each data piece is always online and search-ready to return results instantly, which helps the business leverage all that accumulated a wealth of information, carrying a large percentage of the organization’s critical data.
Also, traditionally, email archiving has been in compliance or IT services, which limits its use and puts pressure on the backend to respond to requests for historical data.
By expanding the scope of usage safely and securely to all the end users, the accumulated archived data suddenly unlocks trapped value for the business.
Each user can leverage the knowledge discovery tools to uncover trapped knowledge, intelligence, and communication, to help deliver better outcomes for the business.
Lastly, we’ve specifically focused on tools to enable accessible data for the information of any size.
