8 Things to Look for in Email Archiving Solutions

You’ve made the decision to use an email archiving solution for your company. Great! You’ve made a decision that will likely save you thousands of dollars.

Now comes the hard part. How do you pick the best email archiving solution for your company? Not all email archiving solutions are equal. Some offer a wider range of features. Costs vary widely from solution to solution.

When choosing an email archiving solution, there are features you definitely require. Keep reading to learn about email archiving solutions and 8 must-have features.

What is Email Archiving?

On the surface, email archiving is as simple as it sounds: a system for storing email messages in a safe and searchable manner. However, despite email archiving solutions having a 20-year history in the market, they can be complex, expensive, and difficult to use at scale.

Why is email archiving needed?

Email communication continues to be a widely used. It is predicted that by the end of 2025, the number of worldwide email users will increase to over 4.6 billion.

Odds are that your company uses email for internal and external communications. It’s also likely that you have thousands of messages housed on your mail server.

Having too many email messages on an email server can be problematic. Email service can become extremely slow or unavailable entirely. To avoid mail server overload, it’s best to archive old email messages.

You’ll likely want to prevent employees from simply deleting old email messages, so you remain in compliance with data retention regulations.

Archiving email messages offers many benefits, including:

• Knowledge management
• Storage management
• Compliance and auditing needs
• Disaster recovery
• Mail server performance
• Litigation and legal holds

Who is responsible for evaluating email archiving solutions?

Many businesses don’t use email archiving until their mail servers are reaching capacity, or until they have experienced devastating results from litigation where email messages contained a smoking gun – or they were unable to produce email messages in response to legal discovery. Don’t be that business owner.

Now is the time to tackle email archiving efforts.

Your in-house messaging admins can set up an email archiving system. However, it’s best to outsource this work. Outsourcing allows your admins to focus on other IT needs.

Ready to find the best email archiving solution for your company?

8 Must-Haves in Email Archiving Solutions

The purpose of email archiving is so that your company can maintain access to email messages for legal and business purposes. Without a proper solution, odds are your company is spending too much time archiving messages.

Before you spend money on an email archiving solution, be sure you are selecting one that fits your business’ needs.

Here are 8 must-have features when considering email archiving solutions.

1. Compatibility

In the ideal world, your email provider would act as your email archiving solution provider. In the case of many SaaS-based email solutions, this is not possible.

The email archive provider you choose should support a variety of archiving scenarios, including:

• Microsoft Exchange Server on-premises
• Microsoft 365 Exchange Online
• SMTP Journaling
• Policy-based mailbox capture
• Deep processing of .PST files

If a solution is not compatible with all your email capture scenarios, pass it by and find one that is.

2. Ability to ingest past message

The email archiving solution should be able to ingest email messages that existed before the solution is put in place. What good is an archive of messages that doesn’t include all business communications?

Ensure that the provider is able to ingest PST files or an existing mail store. Without this capability, you risk data loss and being out of compliance.

3. An effective and efficient archiving process

There are several ways to archive email messages.

One solution may only archive emails received from outside of the company network. Another solution may archive every incoming and outgoing email, no matter where they originate.

It’s important to understand your company’s archiving system needs.

How robust and in-depth should the archive be? Do you want to keep all email attachments as well? If your company is focused on compliance, a complete archive is a must. Ensure that the solution you choose fits your archiving needs.

4. Data redundancy

Data redundancy is a must-have. Ensure that your data is spread across a variety of data centers. If a data center is affected by a natural disaster, you still need access to your archived email messages. The provider you choose should offer high redundancy levels. Without proper redundancy, your company’s data is at risk.

5. Compliance with government mandates

The email archiving solution you choose must be compliant with government mandates. Policies such as HIPAA, SEC 17a-4, Sarbanes-Oxley, and GDPR should be followed.

If a provider is not compliant, you risk future legal issues. Your data is only as reliable as the system that stores it.

Don’t put company data at risk with improper email archiving.

6. Easy search and retrieval

Don’t assume that your IT team will be the only ones to access the email archives. Relying on your IT team for retrieving messages from an archive will bog down the workload. You want your IT team to focus on more pressing issues!

The email archiving solution you choose should be simple. Ensure an everyday non-IT user can understand and access the solution.

Anyone with access to the repository should be able to search and retrieve an email.

7. Fast searches

Along with easy searching and retrieving, the process should also be fast.

You will likely have thousands, potentially millions of email messages, in the archive repository. Some companies reach into the billions of messages. This means that the search capability needs to be quick at scale.

A quality email archiving solution should be able to sift through the entire archive quickly. Traditional email archiving solutions might take hours or even days to provide search results at scale. A next-gen cloud-based archive can provide “Google-like” search results, even when the result set contains millions of hits. The search and retrieval process shouldn’t take any longer than a few seconds.

If you’re waiting minutes for a search to complete, you’ve got the wrong solution!

8. High ingest speeds

You don’t want to select a solution that will takes months to implement. The sooner you can use an email archiving solution, the better.

Before committing to a solution, be aware of the provider’s data ingest speed. The faster a company can archive emails, the better. Companies with a robust architecture can complete ingests quickly. Don’t settle for a company that draws out the email archiving process.

Store Your Business Data Wisely

Looking for an email archiving solution? Want to implement cloud storage for your company’s data? If so, Veritas is the company to hire.

We are data storage experts and know the importance of a smart storage strategy.

Stop paying high storage costs. Don’t suffer with legacy archiving systems any longer!

Contact us today to archive your company’s data more efficiently.