Email Archiving on Cloud Nine

The main reason for businesses to be involved with email archiving is for compliance, litigation, support, storage management and knowledge management. Some businesses may also use archiving for disaster recovery and monitoring employee communications.

Email could be considered one of the main forms of communication across the globe, and has superseded snail mail as the main tool for communicating with friends and family whether they live on the other side of the world or are just up the road. Though email is not strictly for personal communication, it is also the top method used for sharing information between companies and it is not uncommon for organisations to have their own unique email addresses.

For businesses that use email daily, archiving is essential to the everyday running of a business. There are several reasons why a company should employ archiving in their day to day activities. Most importantly, in the event of a disaster that causes the organisations internal network to be damaged, archiving will act as critical safety net, ensuring important communications are preserved. As well, security is an important reason for a company to consider archiving. An archiving solution can help monitor in-bound and out-bound traffic to minimise data leaks and security breaches.

As well, a good email archiving solution can act as an internal knowledge bank which your business can exploit through data mining. For example, customer support emails are a great resource and may be analysed to compartmentalise common enquiries, as well as analyse what the most effective response to common issues were. Technical support may even want to use the email archive to locate unresolved questions that can be used to develop and improve troubleshooting guides.

The downside to email archiving is the time and effort it can take if done in-house. A company's IT can get bogged down by email maintenance and message recovery. Especially with businesses sending and receiving upwards of 100 emails per person per day, that can really add up and would put a strain on any internal mail server. But if the in-house email solution is supplemented by a cloud service, automated archiving and instant access to archived emails can mean saved resources and reduced costs.

Selecting email archiving solution can be difficult because there are numerous companies offering archiving systems, so businesses should look for a compliance solution that provides flexibility and is available in different formats.

If an organisation uses an in-house mail server, a cloud email archiving solution is the best way to take full advantage of information contained with a company's emails while at the same time reducing the need to invest in costly severs. With a cloud email archiving, eDiscovery is quick and easy and a company can have full access to archived emails for continuity and compliance purposes. A cloud system will also act as a vital life line should disaster strike. And with email being filtered through the cloud, it also reduces the server load by pre-filtering spam and viruses.