More and more people are becoming aware of ‘email archiving’ practices. Email archiving is the process of using a software application (or service), which normally in conjunction with an email server provides a way to centrally store all of an organizations email communications. It also provides a way to search through the archived email messages quickly and easily.

Email, email and more email…

So why would an organization need mail archiving in the first place?

While there can be numerous reasons for a company to use email archiving, here are four important ones:

1. Loads of email
Regardless of the physical size of an organization, if uses a lot of email for business (and these days who doesn’t) then that email contains a lot of valuable information and must be treated as such.

As the amount of email (and information) grow over time, it can get overwhelming to manage properly. New architectures and methodologies are needed to store, manage, search and use this information. Email archival systems are build for this.

2. Compliance
Companies in various industries, especially those in the financial, healthcare, education, and government fields are faced with the task of handling compliance needs concerning data and email management.

With the amount of email increasing exponentially, it’s getting harder to use older methods effectively to monitory and organize all this data. Email archiving systems are very helpful here.

3. Storage & disk space management
Once again the increasing communications eat away at available disk space. Archiving solutions use techniques like single-instance storage (eliminating duplicate email) and compression to save space.

Additionally, a sophisticated email archiving solution will provide other means for space management. For instance email filters can prevent unnecessary email from getting into the archive in the first place; andretention policies allow the organization to set different lifetimes to different types of email (eg. Newsletters to be retained only for 3 months, etc.)

4. Increasing your IT Productivity
In today’s competitive world, an organizations workforce and especially it’s IT department already have a heavy workload. Worrying about email backup and managing long term email storage justs adds to everyone’s woes. By using email archiving software, an organization can automate the collection and storage of email.

A smart email archiving solution allows your IT team to focus on other operational tasks, lowers IT help desk costs by allowing end users to use self-service and allows you mail server to perform better by taking away email storage responsibilities from it.

It doesn’t matter how small or large your organization may be, chances are, you need email archiving.

Note: For a more end-user oriented and an everyday-centric view point of the benefits of email archiving, do have a look at: The need for email archival.

Picture credit: With thanks to Ramberg Media Images.