E-mail Archiving

This new genre of storage solutions will help you manage and maintain the ever growing amount of e-mail accumulating in organizations today

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

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E-mail is increasingly being used as a business communication tool in most enterprises nowadays. Therefore it's important for most organizations to retain all communication carried out by its employees over email. You wouldn't have imagined doing this a few years ago, but now it's become a necessity. You never know when you'll need to pull out a piece of email. Perhaps it's a deal you signed with an important customer, or an entire dialog with another on some other issue. Perhaps you need to pull out a few mails as proof for a legal case. Whatever the case, you can't afford to loose your mail, making it a necessity to archive it all. This increased circulation of emails also puts a lot of stress on the system administrators, who have to manage the same. That's where email archiving solutions come in. This new genre of solutions will keep track of all email in an organization.

Benefits of e-mail archiving
E-mail archiving can significantly reduce the amount of time and effort that administrators spend to perform operations like backup and recovery. It also saves the time end users spend managing their emails, e.g. organizing and recovering accidentally deleted ones. E-mail archiving can especially be important when a virus breakout occurs and a lot of users in the organization loose their e-mail. Employee Monitoring is another thing feasible with email archiving, which can help control the misuse of email. Whether to use this feature or not is a call that the organization has to take, given that it could be interpreted as unethical. Many organizations abroad already follow this practice.With email archiving, there is also reduced burden on e-mail servers, since it would process the most recent emails, and archive the rest. Further, a lot of email archiving solutions also provide support for archiving instant messengers conversations.

How it works
An e-mail archiving solution intercepts all emails sent to and from the mail server in an organization before it even reaches the other person and stores it in a single centralized email archival and analysis system. Before storing the emails in the database, the software filters it through anti-virus and anti-Spam, letting only clean mails to be archived. Once stored, the archiving software provides easy access to archived messages, allowing permitted users to search and retrieve their own messages, or for managers and administrators to search across the E-mails of entire organization. The e-mail archive application protects the integrity and genuineness of the archived mails using methods like encryption, hash calculations, indexing, auditing etc for the period of time specified according to the organizations policy.

A lot of organizations use their back-up tapes for archiving but the problem with that is it is extremely time consuming. An effort to retrieve a deleted email can take really long hours resulting in loss of productivity. Another reason is the tape on which backup is taken eventually will be over written, e.g. when a user gets an email on Tuesday and its backup has been taken on the daily backup tape, then his mail gets deleted on Wednesday and couple of weeks later he finds that his email is missing and by time he requests for restoration, that tape would have some other data.

Types of e-mail archiving
You could have a hosted email archiving, wherein the entire process is outsourced to a suitable service provider. This system saves storage resource requirements of the enterprise. One disadvantage of hosted system is the response time when retrieving or searching messages. Since it is stored in a remote location, your speed of retrieving the message lies on your communication links. You also have to ensure that your mails are secure at the hosted location. Alternately, you could have your own email archiving setup within your own data center. One major drawback with this is that you'll need to pay for the cost of the additional storage capacity, and manpower to manage the whole setup.

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