Email Archiving

Email has become the de facto standard for business communication over the past decade. Providing instant communication anywhere across the planet, it marks the end of those piles of dispatches we had to deal with, transmission of large files as attachments. A host of other benefits have also contributed to their growth.

So who needs to archive emails? Sometime individuals do, but the fact is, this is a must for most businesses. In today’s business world, corporate emails have assumed paramount importance, taking on an increasingly critical role in corporate litigation. In many high-profile corporate cases, emails have become an important source of evidence. Indeed, companies need to be ready with archived email messages, since a single email or a series of electronic messages can serve as an important evidence.

To start with, the email archiving process had been slow to find its feet. However, over the recent years, the growth in archiving has been meteoric, much to the benefit of companies. There are options available to accommodate companies with varying budgets and wide-ranging security requirements. This helps IT managers in charge of archiving emails considerably.

 

In view of its immense benefits, more and more businesses are looking to implement email archiving to comply with various government regulations; but besides the compliance issue, email archiving makes good sense as a standard practice to promote efficiency.

 

There are two principle avenues for email archiving – "hosted" systems and in-house email archiving systems. A "hosted" system is basically an archiving system that is contracted through an outside company. It's an outside service that connects into your email server(s) and captures email as they come through -- moving and storing emails offsite at a remote location.

Often, companies have to decide which system of email archiving they should adopt. Implementing an in-house archiving system is a costly affair with high up-front costs, since companies have to pay for all of the equipment, software, support and storage. Here, companies can buy all of the servers and software and manage their data completely within their own facilities. Hence, for organizations that put the highest priority to data security, creating an in-house email-archiving system is the way to go. In-house setups are typically expensive and may only be in the financial realm of the biggest corporations.

“Hosted” systems, on the other hand, involves hosting email completely off site using services. The costs associated with this system are considerably lesser, thereby making it a good fit for small companies.

Many US-based firms urgently need email archiving. In fact, all firms in North America that are into financial services come under the regulations of the SEC or the Securities and Exchange Commission or Universal Market Integrity Rules governing the markets in Canada – they must abide by the strict data retention guidelines.

As per regulations in US corporate practices, those companies in healthcare have to follow data retention policies that have been specified by many regulatory bodies and statutes, including HIPAA or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, FDA and the Medicare Conditions of Participation. Ministries and government agencies have to comply with several data retention requirements and guidelines, including those from Department of Defense, NASA, many US Code provisions, statutes and agencies and the National Archives of Canada.

The business, legal and risk management teams in companies assume great importance since they are the ones who decide the firm’s archiving requirements. Storage administrators have to keep these requirements in mind, and correspondingly, focus his/her attention to those archive tools that will address the requirements satisfactorily. Choosing the appropriate email archive solutions, infrastructure and operating policies to ensure that the business receives the right spectrum of risk mitigation capabilities is ultimately the storage administrator’s responsibility.

Do individuals need to archive emails?

We see from the above discussion that businesses need to archive emails and we also see how they do it. But what about individuals? Do they also need to archive emails, and if yes, how do they do it? Yes, there may be also a need for individuals to archive emails, but since there is just one email address in question here, the issue is much simpler here. All the person needs to do is just not delete the email and keep it within the inbox. Or he may also create folders based on the various senders and move the emails to these folders. This act will be as good as archiving the email. And if he is using a program like Outlook Express, he can also take a backup of all the emails and cut a CD. This will ensure that there is a second backup medium where the emails are kept.