Email Archiving

The main reasons for an organization to archive its email can be divided into 4 classes. These are: Compliance, litigation support, storage management and knowledge management.

Email archiving can be defined as an application of IT that manages the email messages of an organization with the help of the email server. Archiving helps to retain and preserve all the emails that come in and go out of a server so that they can be gained access to when there is a need. This storing is done in a central location.

Earlier companies had to rely on the end-users maintaining their own individual e-mail archives. But today's compliance legislation and legal discovery rules has made it necessary for IT departments of companies to maintain e-mail archives in such a way that a particular mail can be found within minutes.

In the present-day corporate world, more and more companies are opting for email archiving solutions. Archiving applications are installed within the company and are also like a service that is hosted, both supporting email messaging systems. Certain archiving tools even go beyond storing only mails, and archive various aspects of the mailbox including the PST files, public folders, contacts, notes, calendars and the associated context and metadata. Data protection, user applications for search, eDiscovery, disaster recovery and supervision is also possible using these archiving tools for emails.

Archiving is done by storing material on devices that are magnetic disks. This can be done by two methods:

1. Capturing email straight from the application (e.g. IBM Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise), and
2. An agent in the network gateway that captures the content of the email.

Companies also have an option of choosing from two alternative approaches to EAM or Email Management and Archiving knowledge. These are:

1. Using EAM as one part an overall storage activities and messaging infrastructure
2. EAM usage as a legal application and for essential compliance.

• Disaster recovery and email backup
• Optimization of the messaging system
• Storage optimization
• Regulatory compliance
• Legal Discovery and Litigation
• Monitoring external and internal e-mail content
• Building an archive.

The archiving and storage requirements of present-day companies are growing more and more complex, and hence, email archive tools have to be correspondingly designed. Most organisations critically need to store the e-mails through their network. The underlying infrastructure for IT requires messaging as an integral component in most environments. Indeed, EMA-s has become so popular recently that decision makers define such systems as the most important business and communication applications that are in operation.

 

Email archiving works as an extremely important and helpful application to all departments of companies. Employees from e-commerce, along with many other workers, need to access e-mails because otherwise the sales would be affected and they need it also for managing accounts. Hence, they need to to keep their e-mails for a long time. In such cases, especially if the company has a policy of deleting mails after a certain time period, archiving is the only solution.

 

Archiving helps in litigation issues as well. If companies delete all old emails, chances are high that a message that might have helped them win a court case may also be lost. Here too, archiving is the practical and sensible solution to store mails.

 

Performance of the email server and the efficiency of storage are also improved via email archiving. The email client applications allow people to access the emails and the attachments that have been archived. Following policies that have been defined by the administrator, EMA-s help to remove attachments and email from the messaging server.

 

The risk of data getting spoiled for a company is considerably lowered by using EMA-s, while the discovery functions are speeded up via audit capabilities, message indexing, duplication and protecting all emails that have been archived. In order to prove the authenticity of an email for custody, EMA helps in quick retrieval of the relevant mail message. Indeed, if archiving solutions were not available, mails would have to be stored in backup tapes and on the end users’ workstations. This would make retrieval of a particular email a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Herein lies the value of archiving.

 

Archiving tools are also designed keeping compliance issues in mind. IT departments must today centrally archive and manage the emails the organization gets – this is necessary for them to be found after a search as soon as possible, if possible, within minutes.

 

In accordance with compliance requirements, EMA-s do not store data forever. The administrator would come out with a retention policy and the email record would be stored based on this. The archiving application automatically deletes the emails when this period is over.

 

Thus, we see that archiving is a complex process, but is extremely necessary for the survival of companies in the present world. It helps on numerous counts in the functioning of industries, and it is up to the latter to choose the EMA vendor that is ideally suited to their requirements.