This post is the first in a four-part series about the Benefits of Archiving. Look for the next posts, which will focus on the Top 5 Reasons to Archive Email, how archiving can help you Manage and Analyze your company’s communications and the Cost Savings an archiving system can provide.
In today’s modern electronically connected world, email is essential to productivity and collaboration. Because archiving will protect from file corruption or data loss, it is also essential that your electronic data and your email messages are archived.
There are a variety of other reasons that organizations should archive their email. The specific reasons to do so will sometimes vary from one organization to the next based on a number of factors, including:
- the regulatory environment in which an organization operates
- government regulations requiring that the data be archived
- the legal risks an organization faces
- the overall level of risk that senior decision makers are willing to accept
- the willingness of IT to implement user-focused capabilities for recovering email, etc.
At the very least, it is a best practice to archive your email.
The Difficulty of Email Archiving
Despite the reasons to archive email, businesses often find problems with the archiving solution of their current email platform, whether it is Exchange, Office 365, Gmail, or GroupWise. Some of these problems include:
- Silos of Employee data– Each mailbox or “silo” stores the employee’s data on their individual desktop or laptop computer. This data may include incoming & outgoing messages, appointments, tasks, folders, attachments, etc. With each employee’s silo of data being stored on their machine, instead of being archived, when the hard drive is corrupted or destroyed, all of the user’s data could be lost or could be difficult to retrieve.
- PST files and Personal archives – These types of data can be saved in many locations on the hard drive and can be difficult to locate on the employee’s computer.
- Server Performance – Email servers are experiencing an ever-increasing storage demand, causing them to slow down due to large amounts of data and the lack of single-instance storage.
- Expensive and ever-growing storage – Due to government regulations requiring email to be preserved for extended periods of time, electronic communication storage continues to grow exponentially, thus driving up cost.
- Difficult data retrieval – Because email creates these personal archives, it can be virtually impossible to retrieve data from laptops, desktops, tablets and mobile phones.
Top Reasons to Archive Email
In researching the difficulties businesses have with archiving email, we have discovered the top five reasons businesses consider when deciding how and why to archive email:
- Storage Management
- Knowledge Management
- End User & IT Productivity
- Regulatory Compliance
- Litigation Concerns
Our next post, “Top Five Reasons to Archive Email” will explain why these drivers are in the forefront for decision makers.
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For more information about the GWAVA’s Unified Archiving solution, Retain, and for information about the need for archiving, visit: http://www.gwava.com/Retain
Much of the information for this post is from the Osterman Whitepaper Best Practices for Managing Email Archiving.
