How Good Email Archiving Tools Ensure Compliance While Also Producing An ROI

We live in the digital age and this has taken over every part of our lives. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the digital world is now becoming regulated and messages in particular are getting scrutinized a lot. Today, employers have to be able to produce reports on specific data, sometimes dating back years and this requires solid email archiving tools if they are to be compliant. Usually, “compliance” means “expensive”, but it seems that these tools could actually produce a return on investment.

What the Environment Is Like Now

There are some important facts to know about data management before looking into how compliance can actually be beneficial:

1. Email is now a huge proportion of the data any company owns. Often, the text and its attachments are IP (intellectual property). In fact, around 70% of the IP of a company is believed to be inside its email system. The system, therefore, is like a vault.
2. The volume of email data is growing, which is inevitable. The result of this is that there are growing requirements for better storage and servers. Staff do not want to delete any of their emails and certainly not their attachments, because they may have to return to it. This means that individual accounts need more storage as well.
3. If the email service is disrupted, it can be crippling for a business. A single day down can lead to serious losses.
4. Email systems are backed up, usually overnight, which means there are around 18 hours in a day when data can be changed, deleted, or otherwise go missing. Restoration is almost impossible to do.
5. Any email within a company belongs to that company, which also means they are responsible for it. “Personal email” does not exist within an organization.

How Email Archiving Tools Are Not Just Compliant, But Also an Advantage

There are seven key benefits to being compliant with regulations and using email archiving tools to achieve this:

1. You can capture data very rapidly. All messages are stored in there in their original format. They are stored the minute they are sent or received and cannot be changed. Plus, the system is separate, which means it does not eat into the email system’s resources.
2. It focuses on both instant messaging (IM) and email. Businesses must start to implement a usage and retention policy on their IM servers, which few do. With an email archiving solution, this is essentially done for them.
3. The system can purge emails as per a schedule, for instance after 90 days, meaning the email server becomes less backlogged, but all emails are retained within the archival system.
4. It ensures that periodic internal audits can be completed with ease. All data will be intact and all policies can therefore be adhered to.
5. It ensures businesses can comply with any subpoenas for information in an instant.
6. Recovery after disruption is instant, again because the two systems are separate.
7. It ensures employees know what is expected of them, and that all their messages are kept within a separate server.