If you are frustrated and overloaded with emails there is help. The preservation of electronic business records and other important documents that are stored in the company’s email system is becoming an increasing difficult problem. The sheer volume of data that must be stored, indexed, and protected can be daunting, even in smaller companies. It only gets more difficult when you add in the regulatory, legal and governance requirements that many businesses must follow.
The problem is escalation. If you are archiving 100k emails this year, you are going to have to add at least that many on top of it the next. It gets even worse when your company (perish the thought) actually starts to grow and you add more employees.
What Are Your Policies For Email Archiving?
Despite this growing need, very few companies actually have a system or policy in place to make sure all the necessary emails and documents are properly stored and protected. Many companies are not training their employees to handle the email and other content that needs to be retained on a long term basis, and a lot of important data is getting lost or outright deleted.
Where are you going to offload all this information? A single server will be able to store a lot of emails for a while, but eventually you are going to need something more. Add to that the possibility of a disaster (natural or otherwise) destroying your in-house server and you realize that all of your documents may not be as safe as you had hoped.
You can’t just delete it (you shouldn’t even want to delete it), and you can’t just keep adding new servers every time your company adds a few more employees. You need to keep this information for regulatory or customer relationship purposes, but you need to find a cost effective way to do it.
Finding An Email Archiving Solution
There are a number of companies that provide email archiving and off-site storage solutions, but you need to look closely at the features they offer before you make your final choice. Different companies will need different levels of storage, so it is important to make sure you have all the options you need. These features should include:
- Accessibility – Email archiving is about more than just preserving the information. It’s about making it searchable and accessible to authorized personnel whenever the information is needed.
- Scalability – If you have 50 employees this year, averaging 50 emails a day, you will need to archive 625,000 emails a year. Of course, for every employee, this number just gets bigger, until 100 employees means 1.25 million archived emails. Make sure your system can handle the load.
- Multiple Platform Support – Different employees may use different platforms to handle their emails. Make sure your solution can integrate information from all of their platforms.
- High Availability – If you are audited by a regulatory agency or you have a customer that demands special attention, you need to know that your archiving solution will be reliable and available on demand.
- Easy to Learn – As your company grows and you add more people, everyone needs to be educated on what information must be retained for the long term. It should also be easy to handle the archiving processes.
Every year companies will need to store more information, and they will need to access and organize that data according to the demands of the consumers or regulatory organizations. The sooner you start implementing a reliable archiving solution, the sooner you will be able to get on top of this flood of data.