David Kelleheron April 10, 2014

How many email messages do you send each day? How many do you receive? Like many regular users, you probably send over 30 messages per day and receive over 100. If you are a power user, you can probably double those numbers and still come up short. With so much mail flowing through your inbox, it is far too easy to find your inbox full, to suffer from information overload, or even to get a little delete-happy and drop messages that you may need later on. Whether you are limited by the size of your mailbox, or the storage on your solid-state drive, there is a very good chance at some point you or your employees are going to find the need for an email message that was deleted.

Email archiving can save the day. Here’s how.

Disk space

We will go beyond storage in just a moment, but we have to point out how important storage is, and how email archiving can save the day. While Exchange continues to reduce its disk I/O demands, disk storage in Exchange still comes at a premium. The larger the mailbox, the more disks you need, and the longer it takes to back up and restore databases. And when very few users access older mail regularly, it doesn’t make sense to use up top tier storage for older content that is only infrequently needed. Email archiving can save that premium disk space by moving older content to less expensive storage. It’s still there when you need it. It just doesn’t cost as much.

Data protection

How much data is scattered across your company’s laptops, network drives, USB keys, DVDs, external hard drives, and in PSTs? How often are you asked to recover data from a corrupted PST or asked to restore data from a backup tape you shelved months ago? When messages are stored on media outside your control, or in formats not suitable for enterprise needs, the chances are good data will be lost. Email archiving can truly save the day by keeping all the data under your control, where and when you can get to it. Combine this with good backup practices, and your chances of data loss are practically nil.

Retention policies

When you need to maintain data for a period of time, and then to delete data that is older, retention policies can help you meet those requirements. Of course, you must have a place to store all that data so it’s around when you need it. Email archiving is the perfect solution, as it is separate from your messaging system and your employees’ mailboxes. Data can be maintained in accord with your retention policies, and you won’t have to worry about employees deleting things.

Search and compliance

In addition to retention, you may find the need to maintain all emails for compliance purposes or legal requirements. Email archiving can selectively store specific messages between your employees and your customers, messages between HR and management, all content sent to or from a specific user, or any other variant you may need to meet compliance requirements or support internal investigations and record keeping. And once in the archive, all of that data can be easily searched by authorized personnel to validate policies are being followed, or to quickly locate key pieces of information.

Intelligence

There’s even more that email archiving has to offer. Email archiving can help you to mine all the communications that go on within your business, or between your business and others. Who is your most needy customer? Who is your most responsive vendor? Which teams spend the most time in cross-collaboration? Mining your email for intelligence can reveal patterns that help you to better understand your business, ensure that response times are being met, and see where adjustments may be required. Knowledge is power, and there is much you can learn from your company’s communications if you have the tools to process the data.

Whether you are asked by the CEO to bring back a critical message from the dead, by HR to investigate a potential issue, or by sales to find that order the customer emailed but they lost, email archiving can save the day, several times a day, day after day. Email is one of the most critical applications in your environment, and it’s the one every single employee will use multiple times per day.

Email archiving can save the day, but you can take the credit.