Whether or not an enterprise should establish and maintain an email archive seems to be a question long since answered and yet, there are still enterprises resistant to the idea. An email archive, in this instance, implies an offsite retention and retrieval system whether that consists of enterprise-maintained servers or Internet or cloud-based storage solutions.
Of the three basic choices, the rationale for keeping the archive offsite only makes sense if one considers the potentially fatal blow struck to an enterprise visited by a natural or man-made disaster; even one with a dedicated back-up, retention and retrieval email archive. If it is onsite, it may be damaged or destroyed along with other equipment, furniture, etc.
There are good reasons to choose an effective, efficient email archive solution of one of the three types. The obvious protection afforded the enterprise against a disaster is just the first of several other vital reasons. Without it, the affected enterprise in today’s competitive business environment is virtually lost without the ability to restore critical email communications and other electronic documents if the disaster did not already close the doors by itself.
Here are just two additional reasons why having an email archive is vital to any enterprise:
Legal and regulatory concerns. An enterprise may continue its entire business life without being directly engaged in litigation or affected by regulatory agencies. However, these concerns are a trap any enterprise will fall into if they have not taken the precaution to be prepared for these events.
If an enterprise is involved in a regulated industry, maintaining email communications is an essential part of most if not all regulatory statutes enforced by government or industry agencies. They will also be called upon as evidence in facility audits to backup claims of compliance to regulations.
An enterprise may never be a litigant in a court case as either the defendant, the prosecution, or as a witness, but that non-involvement cannot be predicted with any accuracy. If email communications are under subpoena, the enterprise is duty-bound by law to produce them within a “reasonable” period of time; typically expected to be gathered overnight for producing in trial the next day. Only an efficient email archive solution can make the required search quickly and completely.
Scalability as email volume increases in size and complexity. If your enterprise decided that it could devote a server to file email communications and it was treated as merely a storage device like a file cabinet, it will eventually become too small to accommodate both the volume and complexity of emails. Emails are like rabbits; for each mailbox, they generationally multiply exponentially. Combined, they present an overload even if new mailboxes are not added, but what growing enterprise does not add mailboxes? “Eventually” could be next year. It could be next month.
Purchasing and maintaining added servers is possible, but it is an expensive and growing budget to do so.
There are better, more efficient and cost-effective solutions, such as a cloud-based email archive, which requires no hardware, no software and no maintenance to initiate and operate a virtually infinite scalable email archive solution.
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