Monday, August 31, 2009

Email Archiving Solutions

By Brian Warren

Archiving is a systematic process of capturing every email that hits the mail server; preserving the flow of incoming, outgoing, or internal emails so that a single email or a group of emails, centered around a specific set of criteria, can be easily accessed and retrieved.

Most companies back up their email on the Microsoft Exchange server, which is the most popular email exchange server. It must be noted, however, that backup is not the same as archival. What backup does is to save a copy of your email for the purposes of restoring that information onto the server. Archiving on the other hand, gives your company the capability to store, discover and retrieve emails within seconds. There are many reasons why people opt for email archival. Three important ones are:

Compliance to Regulatory Requirements: Most companies, particularly those listed publicly are bound by regulatory guidelines to store all company data, including emails for a specified number of years. When asked, in a regulatory situation, this data must be produced with appropriate proofs of version control and datestamps. Since we already know that backup is not the same as archival, it might be extremely difficult to retrieve the required data easily, if you have not invested in an email archiving solution. You might end up spending a lot of money and resources unnecessarily, just because you are not able to pull out the right information from the right place.

eDiscovery Requirement: Any company needs to plan the right course of action when faced with a litigation or a lawsuit. Company counsel and IT staff often have difficulties in locating the right emails, and documents. Added to this, lawyers also need to provide judges with the accurate information on how the evidence data was stored, and how it was retrieved. If you do not have a right solution in place, providing this information can become impossible, which might mean millions of dollars in lawsuit settlement. With new scandals like the fraudulent ponzi scheme and sexual harassment cases, becoming common, it is only prudent to be well equipped with all the right evidence.

Management of Exchange Server Storage: Emails are growing at a rate of 40% per year. In fact, 97% of all official communication in companies is conducted via email, according to a Gartner survey report. As a result of this, there is an increased pressure on your company's Microsoft Exchange server, and it is handling more data than ever, which may end up with poor performance of the server. You can easily resolve this problem by investing in a good email archiving solution, which helps lighten up the server for improved efficiency, performance and better storage management. Configure your email server with an archiving solution to handle email growth more effectively and postpone the need to upgrade the Exchange server. This results in increased ROI on that Exchange server and better storage management for your company.

There is no doubt that Email Archiving is the way forward to meet with your company's growing demand for optimized storage management, as well as compliance with regulatory and eDiscovery processes. Invest in a sound Email Archiving solution to help alleviate your email archival woes. - 22787

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