Remote Email Archive Services

Emails can easily get lost or deleted by users, and Companies need to have an “Original State” record of all emails sent and received. Plus, Email systems are increasing in size dramatically year on year which needs to be controlled by removing emails older than 6 months or 1 year. Did you know that Government Agencies are required by Law to have this type of Email Archiving in place.

A Simple Email Archive Service

Archive every email that goes through your email server to our remote archive servers and automatically remove any emails older than 1 year off your email server. You can always login to our archive servers to look at any of your old emails.

The Corporate value of Email

A study conducted by market researcher Gartner Group revealed that organizations conduct almost 97% of their communications via emails. Furthermore in a recent survey, Osterman Research found that email is now accepted as written confirmation of approvals or orders in 79% of organizations. 

Since emails have become the electronic substitutes of legal business documentation, the information being passed on through this electronic correspondence constitutes a record. Consequently, such correspondence must be retained for a minimum period of time, often established by statutes. Due to email predominance in the business industry, various pieces of legislations have been enacted to protect personal privacy, enforce corporate governance standards and maintain ethical conduct, such as the Freedom of information act (FOIA).

What is the ‘true’ meaning of email archiving? 

An email archive is a repository generally kept in a non-productive environment to provide secure preservation of email for compliance and operational purposes. A ‘true’ email archiving system automatically extracts message contents and attachments from incoming/outgoing emails and after indexing, it stores them in read-only format. This ensures that archived records are maintained in their original state.

Email archiving moderates the demand for storage space by reducing the amount of online emails on the mail server. The active approach adopted by email archiving solutions ensures that the company has a centralized and accessible copy of all its email. This provides additional protection against accidental or intentional deletion of emails by end users. Email archiving also eliminates the need to search for personal archives on each and every local machine whenever litigation support is requested.

What are the primary reasons to archive email? 

There are four predominant reasons for an organization to archive its email. These are: Compliance, litigation support, storage management and knowledge management. 

• Compliance
  
  The new regulatory environment is  one of the major drivers behind the increase in demand for email archiving solutions. It is estimated that over 10,000  compliance regulations have been enacted around the world. More stringent controls and severe penalties are forcing organizations to address regulatory compliance more seriously.
   
• Litigation support 
  
  Nearly all companies in the course of regular business activities become implicated in lawsuits. Litigation discovery is the process in which parties involved in a lawsuit are requested by the court of law to submit information which is relevant to the case. The company which receives the discovery request is obliged to search its records and to submit all the relevant/requested information in a timely manner. The cost of producing the information for litigation can be colossal and can often outweigh the damages sought in the suit. This is most common in organizations which do not have an adequate email archiving solution in place.
   
• Storage management 
  
  It is estimated that, one in every  four organizations experiences storage management growth in excess of 25% per year. This drastic escalation in storage requirements is mainly attributed  to the increase in use of email in general, added to the upsurge of attachments, which increased the size of the average email from 22 KB to 350 KB. In fact, it is estimated that nearly 50% of organizations are providing more than 350 MB of storage per user. Organizations often make use of email storage quotas to prevent message stores from growing and degrading server performance. The downside of quotas is the effect they have on end user productivity. Apart from stopping users from using their email whenever their storage allowance is exceeded, quotas can have more serious implications. For instance, quotas and subsequent blockages might drive users to delete important messages from their mailbox in order to make room for new email.
  
  The increase in email usage as well as the relative growth in email size has also affected the efficiency, reliability and speed of message servers. A study by Osterman Research affirms that email stores are growing at 37% annually. Consequently keeping email in a ‘live’ (online) storage format will necessitate more physical storage space as well as increasingly powerful hardware to handle these loads.
  
  Compliance regulations have further contributed to the increased demand for storage by obliging organizations to preserve old email for predefined periods. While storage solutions can be used to deal with the problem of message storage growth, an email archiving solution provides a more versatile way of handling this problem. Apart from centralizing your email records, an efficient archiving solution will  store the emails in a compressed format, resulting in considerable disk space savings when compared to a traditional mail store. Furthermore, the emails will be automatically archived as soon as they pass through the message store, thus users can clean up their mailboxes without the worry of losing important emails. Additionally, an email archiving solution that allows authorized users to view emails from a central repository will encourage them to do without having bulky PST files stored locally. Considering the fact that PST files usually take 2 to 5 times more physical storage than an email archive, this would add up to considerable disk space savings.
   
• Knowledge management
  
  An organization’s email system is a corporate knowledge  repository. It can contain vast quantities of useful email information which is often vital to a business and allowing access to this corporate asset can make users more productive.  An email archiving system can provide appropriate knowledge management tools (for example, email records sorting, advanced search and retrieval functions) that enable IT and end users to better manage the knowledge base contained in the company’s email archive.

How is Archiving Emails different to Email Backups?

The Email Backup should only be a backup of current Emails on the Email Server. All Emails over 6 months or 1 year should be automatically removed from the Email Server. If they need to be viewed again, then the user can log onto the company archive email system. Moving old Emails to an archive solution would mean that this space would be saved from your current backup device or system. Thus saving money each month on remote backups or helping Tape Backup drives last longer.

What features should an email archiving solution have? 

• Minimal user intervention/automation – Company emails have to be archived automatically and with the minimal human intervention possible. 
• Indexing of records and search capabilities – Archived emails should be indexed, especially the text content, so that search facilities will enable the quick extraction of records to support regulatory audit requests and legal discovery. 
• Data retention policy control – The system must include configuration features through which the company can define its archiving criteria. These features should at least allow archiving of specific mailboxes and messages from specific domains or email addresses. In such a way, unnecessary contents such as spam and other informal correspondence is automatically excluded from the archive.  
• Security/tamper-proofing – An email archiving system must be capable of protecting records from loss, damage or misuse. Record authenticity (i.e. preservation of a record in its original state) is one of the key requirements in many of the content regulations imposed by the laws. In addition, archiving programs must include access restriction features. 
• End-user and management access to archives – This feature allows a company to use its email archive as a central knowledge repository from  where authorized users  can extract information required during productivity. One further benefit is that it enables authorized users, such as compliance officers, to access the information contained in the archive without the need for support by IT staff.

Your Next Step To Find Out More

Get in touch with i4impact by completing our contact form or calling us on 0845 287 2442