An email archiving solution is a standalone IT application that is installed on an enterprise email server such as MS Exchange and Lotus Domino. Once up and running, this software will be in charge of saving copies of sent and received emails for record keeping and compliance purposes.
Most companies will benefit from choosing and installing one of the many email archiving solution available. However, the following types of companies will require such a system due to those compliance reasons: banks, financial institutions, police headquarters, healthcare facilities, government offices, and the construction industry.
Why Email Archiving is Important
Emails are very important communication tool for every type of business. According to recent studies, almost 97 percent of all business communication was handled through email. Another survey went further to investigate the importance of emails and uncovered that 79 percent of all businesses accept emails as conformation of approvals or orders.
A third survey also managed to highlight the importance of email in today’s business sphere by disclosing that 83 percent of a business’ critical information can be found in these electronic messages. With so much importance given to emails today, it is no wonder that the need for email archiving solutions is growing on a daily basis.
Most companies in the United States are bound legally to keep and manage their emails because of the delicate nature of the information exchanged through them. Emails can be requested as evidence in legal cases, which is why companies make sure that they are stored in their original state and have to ensure that records are as complete as possible.
Email archiving is useful in this regard because it reduces the amount of time spent on searching for emails relevant to cases and eliminates the need to spend so much money on retrieving emails saved on a backup system.
Benefits of Email Archiving
By installing an email archiving system in your company, you will be able to take advantage of the numerous benefits these systems have to offer. Some of the benefits you can enjoy are:
- Monitoring Employee Communication – Though some may say that this is an invasion of employees’ privacy, businesses need to secure themselves and ensure that their information isn’t emailed outside the company. Email archiving systems allow you to make flags for certain words and terms to ensure sensitive information isn’t being shared when it shouldn’t be.
- Speeding Up the Email Server – One of the common problems which hinder an email server is the fact that many employees store data in their mailboxes. Larger mailboxes means the mail server has more to do to manage them. However, archiving emails creates more space on the server and ensures that it can concentrate on passing email traffic as designed.
- Countering System Failure – Archiving emails prevents your information and correspondence from being deleted altogether if the system fails. With so much information stored in inboxes, it can be devastating to lose them.