Welcome to our new blog series on e-mail archiving!
E-mail systems are not designed to manage huge volumes of data, and yet they are forced to do so by an ever growing e-mail flood. In real terms, this leads to mail server capacity problems. As a result, servers may become slow and unstable and ordinary maintenance routines can take a disproportionate amount of time – or users are forced to limit their e-mail volume and thus store their e-mails in PST-files.
The fact of having e-mails stored at dispersed locations directly leads to the next challenge: to quickly retrieve specific e-mails when needed. Furthermore, archiving business correspondence is a legal requirement and more often than not, includes the need to archive e-mails.
All these troubles are surely worth to have a closer look at archiving e-mails. We'll do so in five consecutive blog articles and start with the three most important reasons to opt for an e-mail archive. With an effective archiving solution in place, administrators and end users benefit from various advantages such as increased productivity and will not need to worry about mail server scalability or mailbox limitations.
Legal Compliance – a proactive approach is best
Legislature dictates precisely what e-mail content must be archived and for how long. There are no exceptions or excuses to these laws, and non-compliance may lead to severe penalties. On the other hand, there are rules in place which define the content that must not be archived.
An e-mail archiving solution helps you to adhere to legal compliance requirements and even provides additional benefits regarding productivity.
Mail Server Offloading – relief for administrators
E-mail servers need to manage growing data traffic. As a result, these systems often become unstable and slow if not maintained accordingly. These efforts for maintenance, hardware and upgrades incur additional costs. Likewise, backups and restoration are then disproportionately complex and lengthy. The cost of storing mail data in e-mail systems is relatively high.
Modern archiving solutions address these issues by reducing the data volume on e-mail servers to the data from the last few weeks – instead of years.
The Infinite Mailbox – productivity gained easily
A great deal of business relevant information is very often only available via e-mail. As a matter of fact, reliable retrieval of old e-mails is essential. However, mailbox limitations force users to delete e-mails or to locally save complex archives – which makes their recovery more difficult. It also increases the risk of losing important e-mails as local archives might not be included in regular backups.
With structured and quick search functions, archiving solutions offer significant facilitation for the user. Users get access to the archive and process archived e-mails exactly like “normal” ones in their inbox.
After having considered the reasons for mail archiving, the next logical step is to take a look at the different deployment scenarios.
Stay tuned for part II of our new blog series on mail archiving!
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The original article/video can be found at 3 reasons that make mail archiving a priority