Email Archiving Best Practices
Considering the fact that email is gradually gaining the status of electronic DNA evidence and that electronic data is increasing immensely within a business, it is critical for businesses to have an email archiving system in place. Before you can select the email archiving solution that will work best for you, it is important to understand various technical and business aspect related to each of these various kinds of solutions, the reason why your enterprise needs one and how to select the one that will meet the requirements of your organization.
Archiving – do you need it?
Electronic discovery is the recovery of electronic data for the purpose of meeting certain legal or regulatory requirements or for human resource concerns or for some general business purpose. Email archiving allows an organization to avail electronic search and electronic discovery, which prove to be highly beneficial for the organization. Apart from this an archive enables an organization to deal with the all kinds of legal, regulatory, storage and business challenges presented by email.
Email archiving solutions – types, merits and demerits
- In-house archiving solutions: This kind of solution requires a dedicated server based platform that archives the emails from the message store to the centralized and secure in-house repository. The major advantages of such a solution are security and convenience. The organization has a complete control over the data and the system seamlessly integrates with the infrastructure. However, it involves high fiscal costs. Considering the large amount of data that is sent through emails, the organization needs a significant amount of storage hardware. Again, certain solutions require software to be installed at every PC in order to facilitate search and discovery. Skilled personnel are also required to maintain the in-house archiving solution.
- Hosted archiving solutions: Such solutions do not burden the in-house IT resources instead the emails are archived at a different location. In this manner the company can avoid the additional hardware and software costs involved in an in-house archiving solution as well as the cost of maintenance of the system. However a major issue is with the security of the data, as the data is mostly not encrypted at the user’s end. Also, since there is no integration of the archives and the organization’s email server hence the actual management of the archives is a challenge.
- SAAS hybrid archiving solution: This integrates the features of both the above type of solutions. In a SAAS (software-as-a-service) hybrid archiving solution, a secure storage is maintained in a cloud by a third party provider. It is integrated with the user’s end with the help of an instrument. Encryption of data at the user’s end ensures security as data cannot be deciphered by any person outside the customer’s network. Thus it is both secure as well as convenient. This kind of email archiving solution is most popular amongst organizations.
Considering the above, email archiving solutions have become a necessary for any business, irrespective of the size of the organization.
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