Why You Need Enterprise Cloud Email Archiving.
Geraldine Hunt
Why You Need Enterprise Cloud Email Archiving.
An enterprise organization could receive thousands of emails a day, and many messages are accidentally deleted or lost. Keeping a record of email messages serves several purposes that might not always be obvious at first. Whether it’s for compliance, legal documentation and investigations, or purely to help users recover lost email, a cloud email archiving solution is necessary for an enterprise organization.
Centralized Search and Recovery for Email
Most administrators are aware of backups and the importance of a retention plan, but they don’t realize the importance of centralizing backups and recovery tools. It’s true that backups and archives are two terms used interchangeably, but they have slightly different meanings. Archives are a form of backup, but archives are mainly used to keep an audit trail and record messages for a set amount of time, usually for months and even years.
By using a cloud email archiving tool, administrators have a central repository of email messages where they can perform searches and find a specific subset of messages. Normally, administrators and legal teams have access to email messages for compliance and investigations. These staff members can search for email messages from a central dashboard and find messages using search queries. It’s a necessary part of the legal process especially when it’s needed as evidence for litigation.
Improved Business Continuity and Security Posture
Statistics show that 70% of companies go out of business after a severe data breach. Email is one of the most common attack vectors, and payloads often affect email servers and user inboxes. As most organizations know, a loss of email messages can be devastating for a business, especially an enterprise that relies heavily on email to communicate. Any negative impact on customer data could result in a drop in brand loyalty and trust.
A disaster recovery plan will include email backups and archives. Archiving email messages and their attachments in the cloud keep a copy offsite where most malware cannot reach it. For example, ransomware will scan the network for backups, but cloud-based archives are often unreachable from a typical malware scan.
Should the organization be the target of ransomware, the cloud archives can be used to recover quickly. Use the email archives to reduce the time it takes to bring the business back to operational productivity, which is a primary goal for a disaster recovery plan. Using email archives, an organization can turn weeks of recovery into only a few hours depending on the amount of data that must be transferred from the cloud to local user inboxes.
Did You Know?
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saving on email storage space
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emails sent and received daily by 2026
Better Performance for Email Searches
A main function for any good email archiving solution is an optimized search feature. Standard backups are usually cumbersome and aren’t meant for search email messages for a specific word or attachment type. With email archiving solutions, administrators can perform searches quickly with access to groups of emails that can then be extracted for evidence.
The quality of search performance depends on the solution and the cloud infrastructure used to host email archives. Cloud providers offer ways for administrators to scale their infrastructure, so additional resources can be provisioned even after the initial archiving application deployment. Scalability is one feature that the cloud offers for every type of resources, and resources cost much less than the cost to host them locally.
Lower IT Budgets for Storage
Cloud resources are notoriously beneficial for IT budgets. Hosting any IT resources on-premises is expensive, but provisioning an email archive solution in the cloud requires a fraction of the cost. Also, cloud resources are much easier to scale and add infrastructure as the corporation grows. In an enterprise, executives determine their budgets every year based on the cost of infrastructure to maintain and provision in the future.
A cloud email archiving solution costs a fraction of the budget necessary to host it on-premises. The cloud-hosted archived email could require terabytes of storage, but it’s an affordable and convenient way to add storage capacity even as the organization grows and needs more throughout the years. Cloud providers offer a central dashboard where administrators can provision more resources at the click of a button, and resources are available within minutes. The entire process is much more convenient and affordable than hosting email archiving resources on-premises.
Compliance Requires Comprehensive Email Archives
Every organization has at least one compliance standard that oversees its data protection and archive strategies. Before choosing a cloud provider and an email archiving solution, make sure that it follows the platform and is compliant. For example, many organizations must follow PCI-DSS standards when working with customer payment information. The email solution that you choose should be compliant with any data protection and storage requirements.
Compliance isn’t only important for data protection. It also sets forth standards for user data access. Legal representatives usually have access to email archives, but standard users should not be able to access an archive of everyone’s messages. You might give access to their own data, but not to other staff members. Ensure that the solution you provision has the access control features necessary for compliance and protection of sensitive information.
Email is so popular that despite technological changes, including social and collaboration platforms, email usage is expected to rise to 376 billion daily emails in 2025.
Migration to a New Cloud Solution Should Be Convenient
If you don’t have an email solution installed or you want to move to a different solution, administrators should have access to migration tools that make it convenient without any data loss. It could take a while for data to migrate across the network to the cloud, but the solution you choose should make the actual process convenient and intuitive.
Another aspect of email archive migrations is the performance of the network during migration. Administrators might consider migrating at a specific timeframe, usually during off-peak hours so that productivity isn’t affected. Archives can be taken from current inboxes but should not inhibit users from accessing their email during their productive hours. A good solution makes this process intuitive for administrators so that they can migrate to the cloud without affecting user performance.
Cloud-Based Archiving Eliminates Fragmenting of Email Data
During an investigation, legal people extract email messages necessary for litigation. The messages must tell a story based on a specific search query and audit trail. With a cloud-based email archiving solution, messages are kept in one place so that all messages are available for a search rather than fragmented across infrastructure, which happens when administrators choose on-premises solutions.
Especially during investigations, the organization must avoid fragmenting emails across different infrastructure resources. This mismanagement of data could lead to missing important messages during the discovery phase of a legal issue. Missing data due to fragmentation is costly and could cause compliance issues as well. Any compliance issues could also cost the organization money from violations.
Flexibility is Increased with Cloud Solutions
Scalability and affordability are two benefits of the cloud, but it also brings more flexibility to administrators’ daily work responsibilities. Any IT resource should be secure and function as expected, but any solution should also make it easy for an administrator to perform a specific function rather than add hurdles and inhibit their ability to be productive.
The flexibility of your chosen solution is important as most enterprise organizations make changes to their basic workflows to account for changes in their industry, the economy, or their data protection strategies. Any archive solution should be able to change with administrator changes to workflows. For example, administrators might add new locations for inbox storage, and an administrator must be able to configure the solution to take snapshots of the new storage location.
ArcTitan covers every one of these necessary cloud email archiving benefits. Try out our solution and find out why ArcTitan is rated one of the best email archiving solutions on the market.
Geraldine Hunt
- DATA PROTECTION
- EMAIL ARCHIVING
- COMPLIANCE
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How does email archiving work?
Email archiving involves sending an exact copy of a message outside the email system for long term storage. The messages are usually deduplicated and compressed to save on storage space and are indexed prior to archiving to ensure the archive can be rapidly searched. Email archiving solutions typically have end-to-end encryption to ensure messages cannot be intercepted and the emails are maintained in a tamper-proof repository and can be quickly retrieved on demand.
Is email archiving necessary?
Emails must be retained for compliance and need to be produced quickly for audits and e-discovery. Email recovery is far faster with an email archive. Most businesses have important data stored in email accounts that is stored nowhere else. That data is at risk if it is not sent to an archive. In the event of a ransomware attack that also encrypts backups, email data could be lost forever or cost millions to recover. The regulatory fines for loss of email data can be astronomical.
Is email archiving expensive?
Email archiving in the cloud is a low-cost solution that allows businesses to retain a tamper-proof copy of all messages to meet compliance requirements and for disaster recovery. An email archive saves on mail server storage space, which will increase performance. When you factor in productivity improvements and the reduced time producing emails to resolve customer complaints, for audits, and E-discovery requests, an email archive is money well spent.
Is email archiving the same as backing up email?
Email archiving and backing up email are not the same. Backups are intended for short term email storage for disaster recovery purposes. Entire mailboxes can quickly be restored from a backup if a mailbox is corrupted, deleted, or encrypted with ransomware. An email archive is a long-term email storage solution. In contrast to a backup, an archive can be rapidly searched allowing individual emails to be quickly found and recovered.
How much space can be saved with an email archive?
The amount of space saved by implementing an email archiving solution will vary from business to business, but typically businesses can reduce storage space by up to 80% by implementing an email archive and further, if emails ever need to be recovered, the archive can be rapidly searched, and emails retrieved in seconds.