Choosing an Email Archiving Solution

As large numbers of enterprises today are investigating email archiving solutions, it is critical to understand and evaluate these solutions. Before embarking on an email archiving solution there is a need to understand a range of business and technology issues. Understanding the reasons why your organization needs an email archiving solution and how to choose one that fits your needs will play a key role in choosing the right solution for your enterprise. 

Need for Archiving

Regardless of the size of the industry, electronic search and electronic discovery have become prime considerations for every business. Electronic discovery is the retrieval of data to meet a legal request, regulatory compliance, human resource concern or any other corporate need. All organizations benefit from the search and discovery capabilities for email. It is therefore essential to provide a secure, searchable and centralized repository for email. And an archive can address the complete range of legal, regulatory, business and storage challenges presented by email.

Email Archiving Solutions

It is vital to examine the types of email archiving solutions as that will help in selecting a solution that will work best for your organization. Understanding the differences between the solutions is critical in determining the best solution.

• In-house Archiving Solutions

An organization needs to define requirements and purchase the necessary software to deploy an in-house email archiving solution. The organization would also need a significant amount of storage hardware considering the large amount of email data that is usually sent. Typically, an in-house email archiving solution uses a dedicated, server based platform that copies all email from the message store into an archive.  There are certain solutions that require software to be employed on all employees’ PCs to facilitate searching and retrieval. 

In-house solutions offer a high level of data security and control, along with convenient integration with other systems in the organization’s infrastructure. But when considering an in-house email archiving solution, organizations need to keep in mind the additional cost, as these solutions can be expensive to acquire and require skilled personnel to maintain. 

• Hosted Archiving Solutions

A hosted archiving solution is an alternative to the in-house approach. This solution allows a company to archive its data at a different location, thereby reducing the burden on internal IT resources. By outsourcing, the company can avoid the costs of buying the necessary hardware and software and do away with the inconvenience of maintaining an archiving system. 

However, the lack of data security is a serious concern in this approach. Storing confidential data at a third party location can lead to security breaches and privacy concerns, as in most hosted solutions the archived data is not encrypted. Another additional challenge can be the actual management of the archives as there is no direct integration with the organization’s email server.

• SAAS hybrid archiving solutions

The other approach that is fast emerging is the SAAS (software-as-a-service) hybrid model. This solution involves an appliance installed at the customer site that is pooled with secure storage managed in the cloud by a third party provider. This approach combines the convenience of a hosted solution with the best security features of an in-house solution. In certain instances, before the data leaves the customer location, encryption is performed, ensuring that the archived content can not be accessed from outside the customer’s network. 

The hybrid solution is likely to become the popular approach as organizations come to understand the long term costs and maintenance required by email archiving. 

As the electronic data within a corporate environment continues to rise, it is imperative to archive, especially considering that email is fast becoming the electronic equivalent of DNA evidence. It is therefore crucial for any business to have a sound solution in place.

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email compliance and exchange recovery

Email Archiving - The Achilles Heel of Document and Records Management

Email has developed into a major communication channel within every company with thousands of them being exchanged every day. As most business critical information is sent over email, it is imperative for companies to archive all records, whether in paper or electronic form for compliance purposes. The need for compliance has been mandatory due to demands made by government and regulatory bodies like the SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, which were primarily driven by instances of email mismanagement. Over the last couple of years more than 90% of disputes have included email as part of the evidence.

According to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, public companies must keep all documents and communications for seven years following an audit. The penalties for destroying or altering a document can include fines of up to $5 million and imprisonment for up to 20 years. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure state that businesses that have the potential to be involved in lawsuits must prepare themselves to turn over email communications, if requested in a court case. Companies who don't have access to this information may lose lawsuits or incur extra expenses to recover necessary emails. Hence, email is becoming the Achilles heel of document and records management. The best way to protect yourself is through an effective email archiving solution that has become a major challenge for companies.

What is Email Archiving?

Email archiving is an organized way of capturing, saving and protecting every email that moves through your organizations server so that users can access it later, all the while conserving storage space. Email archiving makes it easy to store and manage large volumes of email at a single time and with search and retrieve tools to locate specific emails within minutes, saving companies precious time.

Email archiving not only ensures that the organization remains compliant with applicable laws and regulations; it is the best way to meet eDiscovery requirements. Although email archiving projects are frequently managed by the exchange server administrator, the choice of email archiving software must be carefully evaluated before implementing.

Benefits of Email Archiving

More and more businesses are now using archiving for storage management, to monitor employee communications and for disaster recovery.

Monitoring Employee Communication – This is usually used in legal proceedings where e-mail evidence is requested in association with an employee’s violation of corporate e-mail policies or misuse of business e-mail.

Storage Management – Archiving data helps eliminate past messages and helps free up space on the email server.

Disaster Recovery - Disaster can halt the normal operation of day-to-day business activities. Archiving helps recover the information to the same or to a new server at disk-transfer and LAN speeds. You can recover accidentally deleted or destroyed records that have been archived.

Working without an email archiving solution could be dangerous. Email archiving is perfect for companies who are looking for a solution to protect their mission critical data, reduce server load from emails and preserve data for legal and regulatory compliance requirements.

You may also take a look at -   email archiving solutions  and  email compliance 

Features to Consider While Deploying Archiving Solution

All these requirements lead to a long list of features that have to be supported by a real archiving solution tailored to the SMB. Requirements such as:

•  User ID management
•  User Transparency
•  Capture capability
•  Extraction capability
•  De‐duplication
•  Compression/encryption
•  Retention capabilities
•  Storage capabilities
•  Meta data capabilities
•  Search capabilities (search in search)
•  Litigation hold/Case management
•  Examination (compliance, questionable use)
•  Record destruction procedure
•  Platform support (HW, SW, OS, Mail, Client)
•  Index/Data Base Architecture
•  Data protection solution capabilities.

An SMB must carefully choose which email archiving solution to deploy. If the wrong solution is chosen, the SMB’s e‐mail troubles will double instead of disappear.

The ubiquity of e‐mail within an SMB continues to pose a number of challenges in the areas of storage, mail box size and secure information retrieval. Sonasoft offers a comprehensive portfolio of products for data recovery, exchange backup and recovery, e‐mail archiving and data protection.

Sonasoft ensures that data and applications are protected at all times so that the SMB business continues to run smoothly without any disruption. Sonasoft provides simplified storage and quick, easy access to critical data all at cost effective price points targeted for the SMB budget.

Sonasoft’s Email Archival solutions, SonaVault, is designed to meet regulatory compliance needs of organizations. SonaVault Email Archive systems will capture all incoming, outgoing and internal emails and store them in archive databases as a Single Instance Store (SIS). Also, by use of optional stubbing feature, message contents including attachments will be saved in the archive database and leave behind an empty shell of the message, namely stub in the body of the email. Alternatively messages can be completely deleted from users mailbox and users can access archived emails through SonaVault Web Console. This approach will reduce the size of the Exchange server by up to 90%. SonaVault  Email Archiving Software solution supports Exchange Server 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010. SonaVault solution employs reliable safeguards, including encryption to ensure that the email is tamper-proof and cannot be altered. The solution gives the ability to migrate all existing PST file data into the archive repository. This enables organizations to eliminate PST files proliferation across the enterprise, thus resulting in better email management.