Email Archiving, Electronic Discovery and Compliance
Email archiving is most often talked about in terms of compliance and electronic discovery requests. Knowing the scope of your information stores and being able to easily access archived material is important for e-discovery. Another important driver for email archiving is improving cost effectiveness.
Email Archiving for Efficiency and Cost Savings
By delegating archive stores to secondary servers and alternative storage spaces, companies can drastically reduce mail server costs. A third, sometimes overlooked benefit to implementing email archiving software, is increased efficiency and productivity. After implementing a solid email archiving strategy with the right software, companies can then save their employees time and hassle while reducing strain on their mail servers at the same time.
Why Users Hoard Email, and Why Email Archiving is a Better Solution
More and more, email is used as the primary means of business communication. Email is a no-hassle and unobtrusive way to create an electronic paper trail; helping end-users trace conversations, review previously made points and even hold colleagues to obligations and commitments. This is the primary driver behind people often hoarding emails in massive stockpiles for reference purposes, worried that deleting one might spell disaster for the future. Rarely are old emails used daily or even monthly. They are kept around “just in case,” cluttering up .PST files, inboxes and server space.
Email archiving helps eliminate such clutter and email administrators can use email archiving software to regulate email archiving best practices by targeting specific mailboxes, entire email servers or specific groups. This allows the administrators rights to grant mailbox space based on the needs of the user, preventing an accumulation of worthless emails.
Email Archiving Organization
Archiving software also provides several archiving automation features, allowing administrators the ability to “set it and forget it” once the system is implemented properly. Email messages can be archived based on quotas, sender, subject, date, age, location or size. This gives email administrators a great deal of control over the process, ensuring each mailbox user gets exactly what they need. These archives are then indexed, allowing for easy searching throughout the archives. As the emails are still easily sorted and accessed, their removal from standard inboxes presents few problems to individual end-users and mail administrators. Employees can be comfortable knowing their documents are easily accessible, but unnecessary data is no longer cluttering inboxes or mail server space.
In this process, email archiving software helped increase the efficiency of employees, mail administrators and the mail server. Employees have a clean inbox, free of clutter, without the fear of losing an important email. Only readily required emails are stored in their inbox, creating a more clutter-free inbox than before.
Email administrators can spend less time fixing mail quota dilemmas by enforcing automatic archival guidelines and as a result, less data is stored on the mail server. This means the data servers can work more efficiently, both allowing mail administrators time to work on other tasks, and creating a more efficient email environment for the company at large.
