Electronic Messages remain effective communication tools for businesses. But why is email archiving one of the best features?
This post will discuss email archiving benefits and uses. It will also exemplify how this feature enhances data security and ensures regulatory adherence.
What is Email Archiving?
Email archiving refers to securely storing and preserving electronic messages and attachments for easy access. One can use this feature when they don’t need immediate access to the email but also don’t want to delete it.
Email archiving is a quick and reliable way of storing and organizing emails. It ensures that important information is not accidentally lost. Many organizations use an email archiving system that preserves emails in a format that is digitally stored.
This means that archived emails can later be searched, reviewed, and retrieved if needed. Such a feature helps organizations to manage their email data effectively.
What is the Purpose of Archiving Emails?
Emailing has existed for over 20 years, and many businesses and institutions use its benefits today. So why email archiving is a good business practice? By embracing email archiving, businesses can improve operational efficiency and position themselves for long-term success in the digital world.
Let’s get into the importance of email archiving.
Storage management
Email archiving helps manage email server storage by moving older and less frequently accessed emails to a separate archive. Doing so frees space on the email server for current and more important messages.
In addition, archiving enables the implementation of specific retention policies. This ensures the emails are preserved for the required period, often determined according to the company’s policies.
Also read: Email Thread: What It Is, How To Forward It, Best Practices
E-discovery
Electronic discovery involves obtaining crucial data for litigations, investigations, and other cases. As email is a common communication method in the corporate world, the court often requires access to specific email records. In fact, email messaging systems feature three-fourths of the organization’s intellectual property.
If there is a large flow of email data, finding specific conversations can be challenging in case of compliance requiring investigation. Email archiving makes finding data easier and enables searching through millions of emails within minutes.
Compliance and legal requirements
Many U.S. industries and organizations are required by law to retain certain records of all types of communications including emails for a specific time. Email archiving is an essential practice for businesses and institutions that must maintain a record of all their communications, helping them abide by legal regulations.
Also, various industries are subject to data retention regulations, such as HIPAA in healthcare, GDPR in Europe, and SEC in financial institutions. The organizations are subject to audits by the regulatory bodies so having a comprehensive email archive can help demonstrate compliance with these regulations.
Litigation support
Archived emails can be crucial evidence in investigations and other legal matters. Therefore, archiving them ensures that relevant emails are preserved and can be accessed when and if needed during legal proceedings.
Data loss prevention and security
When an individual archives emails, the technology stores copies of each mail, including accessible tags. This can be done automatically or manually based on the organization’s specific needs, budget constraints, and compliance requirements.
Email archiving safeguards against accidental deletion of emails, data corruption, or hardware failures leading to data loss. It protects emails from unauthorized access and can make restoring the inbox easier if the data is under a cyberattack.
By using email archiving software, organizations can protect their data from phishing attempts and email server malfunctions. Such software also provides a central email repository with the necessary data even if the company’s servers are down. In cases of a network outage, archived emails can be accessed from backup systems.
Historical record
Email archiving serves as a historical record of the communications in one organization. This can be beneficial for understanding past interactions within the organization and auditing and historical research.
Archived emails contain valuable institutional knowledge that can be useful for both current and future employees. An email system contains a record of communications with prospects and business partners.
It contains records of appointments, contacts, and tasks generated by every user. If the communication in the company is primarily via email, the employees can find anything they need with a simple search.
Does Archiving Emails Save Space?
According to research, it was estimated that 333.3 billion emails were sent daily in 2022, and this number has increased to 347.3 in 2023. As we can see, this is a massive amount of data that requires storage. When there’s insufficient storage available, the server’s performance may decrease.
This is where email archiving comes into play. By storing the emails in an archive, businesses save on storage space on the email server. Email archiving gives businesses enough storage capacity for essential data and prevents the system from overloading data.
When the messages are archived, they are typically transferred from a primary email server to an off-site server or a cloud-based storage system designed for archiving purposes. This practice can improve the overall system performance.
Some email archiving software also offers email compression and deduplication and can reduce disk space by 50%
Benefits of Email Archiving
There are a lot of advantages to maintaining email archives for individuals, organizations, and institutions. The reasons for email archiving can include:
- Quick retrieval – Archiving solutions often have robust search capabilities, such as quick and advanced searches. Hence, email archiving makes it easy to retrieve specific emails in a simple and timely manner.
- Easier email navigation – Archived emails are stored with tags such as size, date, attachment file name, etc. This enables individuals and organizations to access specific emails easily, reducing the burden on the IT department.
- Cost-effectiveness – Businesses investing in email archiving solutions can save money in the long run. Archiving saves space and reduces the need for additional storage resources.
- Enhanced efficiency – Email archiving leads to a clutter-free inbox, which may lead to employee productivity as it reduces the time for searching and organizing electronic messages. This means the users can focus on their tasks without being decelerated by a massive flow of emails.
- Excellent integrability – Email archiving solutions can generally be integrated regardless of the company’s email platform. They also support archiving from other communication channels.
Also read: 5 Tips to Engage With Your Clients Without Using Emails
Types of Email Archiving
Several types of archiving are available, the most popular being on-premise and cloud email archiving.
On-premise email archiving
An on-premise archiving solution takes the sent emails and moves them into an indexed database stored on the organization’s physical servers. This makes the emails easily searchable and accessible. That said, these types of archiving solutions typically offer a limited amount of storage.
They are priced by capacity, so the organization will need to pay for additional storage if needed. This type of archiving requires someone to manage and monitor the archiving process as well as maintain its hardware.
Cloud email archiving
Many businesses opt for cloud email archiving as it provides many key benefits. By implementing cloud migration, they can save initial costs as there is no need for maintenance costs or additional hardware for storage.
Compared to an on-premise solution, cloud archiving enables greater flexibility. This includes generous capacity and better security since the data is encrypted and automatically backed up.
Among the advantages of cloud-based archiving is the speed at which the data can be found and recovered. Such services have fast search capabilities and make the archiving process simple.
Conclusion
In this post, we talked about why email archiving is important for many institutions and businesses today. This is a critical practice for managing electronic communications quickly and effectively.
Its benefits extend from quick retention and easier email navigation to enhanced productivity and cost-effectiveness. Email archiving also contributes to compliance with legal regulations. It provides a solid foundation for data management and can improve the overall organization’s efficiency.
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