You can approach email archiving in three different ways: save every email, leave email archiving to employees, or implement an email archiving solution.
Given the number of emails employees send and receive each day, neither the first nor the second one seem like viable options.
Saving every single email would simply take up too much space and would quickly turn quite costly. You also can’t rely on employees to properly archive email as they can easily forget what they need to archive and how.
On the other hand, an email archiving solution allows you to automatically archive, store, and delete emails once the retention period is over.
Let’s go over 7 reasons why you need an email archiving solution.
Ensuring regulatory compliance
Data security standards and regulations differ for each industry sector. Industries such as healthcare, government, and the financial sector are typically subjected to strict compliance laws and regulations.
Nevertheless, regardless of the industry, you need to set clear retention policies for your digital records, and that includes email data.
Email data needs to be stored in a way that enables easy access and fast retrieval in case you need to present your email records as evidence during legal proceedings.
With email archiving solutions, you can easily automate this process and ensure compliance. These solutions will help you preserve your email records, easily retrieve data in its original format in case it’s necessary, and automatically expunge records once the retention period is over.
Boosting productivity
By implementing email archiving solutions, you will enable your staff to be more productive by automating menial tasks and freeing up their time.
Your employees will have proper tools to retrieve any email or attachment at a moment’s notice. Your IT team will also be less burdened as they won’t have to waste valuable time retrieving accidentally deleted records.
Fast and easy retrieval of email data is one of the main features email archiving solutions have to offer. If one of your employees accidentally or purposefully deletes an important email, the archiving solution will enable you to quickly retrieve it.
Metadata is also archived and retrieved along with the email, which makes it even easier to filter through the data and locate the records you are looking for.
Efficient storage management
As email is one of the most important tools for business communication, email records can easily accumulate and clog your storage in a short period of time. This can not only reduce your server space but also hinder the performance of your business applications.
Email archiving can help you free up valuable storage space and reduce storage costs. It can also help prevent the risk of a catastrophe. You can be sure that your emails will be easily recovered in case of data loss or server crash.
Additionally, email archiving allows for smaller inbox sizes, which also requires less storage.
Reducing costs
One of the biggest advantages of reduced storage needs is the corresponding cost reduction.
Not only will email archiving help you reduce storage costs, but also reduce the cost of data loss, as well as the costs associated with IT maintenance.
You can even completely outsource email archiving to a third-party cloud service provider who will maintain your email archive and security for a low monthly subscription fee. This will free up more time and budget for other important business operations.
Improving knowledge management
Email archives can also serve as a knowledge repository and provide easy access to useful knowledge management tools such as email sorting, advanced search techniques, keyword searches, content retrieval, and other tools that can make your employees more productive.
For many organizations, old emails contain a large amount of valuable information and business intelligence. Email archiving can help you leverage these insights and use data analytics from your past email records to make your business more efficient.
Email archiving will also make personnel changes easier. New employees can easily search through the email archive to find useful information that would be easy to miss out on without email archiving. It can also help them get to know customers through their email history and provide a better customer experience.
Automating and centralizing administration
Instead of manually archiving emails, archiving solutions can help you automate this process. Automation not only helps save time but also minimizes the risk of human errors.
Email archiving solutions will also provide you with a centralized database. That way, the archived data is much easier to keep track of and easily accessible to anyone who might need it.
Ensuring business continuity
Email archiving also plays an important role in disaster recovery.
As a primary channel for business communication, emails contain loads of important information that you can’t afford to lose in case a disaster occurs.
Email archiving solutions help prevent data loss and allow you to quickly and easily recover important records in case of a disaster and continue with your regular operations in no time.
If you’re not already using email archiving, consider finding the best archiving solution for your business. It will help you remain compliant, reduce costs, boost productivity, have a useful knowledge base, and ensure business continuity no matter what happens.
Author Bio:
Alex is a passionate tech blogger, internet nerd, and data enthusiast. He is interested in topics that cover data regulation, compliance, eDiscovery, information governance and business communication.
