Needless to say, in today’s business environment, an email (as the mode of communication) has been viewed as more useful and rather flexible than telephone. And in such a corporate world that progressively relies on email communication for sending or receiving business content, it is indeed significant for organizations in meeting the challenges of policy driven email management. And this is where more and more businesses have started banking on the cloud based enterprise email archiving platform for storing, retaining and retrieving their business communication. Failure in creating certain decisive policies and seamless procedures for email management can cause serious and dire consequences. State and Federal law mandates that organizations need to retain their business email and messages for a stipulated period of time and should also be able to retrieve it whenever there is an acute need. Law mandates that users require instant access to their business messages irrespective of its age, in order to maintain high service levels while simultaneously enforcing retention and retrieval.
As a matter of fact, the business’s ability in maintaining and leveraging incredible quantity of email is somewhat directly proportionate to the user friendly attribute, robustness and ease of management of the email archive. Quite ideally therefore, businesses when reviewing the effectiveness of a proposed enterprise email archiving solution also need to consider the following significant questions: Does the email archival solution provide the company with -
- Rapid and instant access?
- Guaranteed content authenticity?
- The sheer ability of enforcing and retaining the disposition policies on an item basis?
- User friendly as well as robust email management?
Indeed, these are some of the basic questions which should be viewed prior establishing an archiving system which matches the businesses criteria. However, an interesting Cohasset Study has shown that 93% of organizations believe that digital records would be significant in the future litigation, hence still many of the companies keep their backup tapes for an extended period of time. To be honest, this is exactly where organizations mainly err. Yes, using backup tapes as the email archive is a staggering mistake which carries with it the dire consequences and necessary fines, which corporates might have to face at the court of law. Well, this is typically because digital tape as the media offers neither information authenticity nor speed. Therefore, trying locating a particular mail message on one mammoth back up is an impossible task whatsoever. Not to mention that on time and permanent disposition of messages (after the requested time period) is equally significant in ensuring that the business complies with the state , Federal and industry regulations as well as follows internal control procedures, which are being established by the corporate governance initiatives.
Although initially enterprise email archiving was put in place for typical government compliance and regulation. However over time it has evolved equally critical for internal operational efficiency as well as governance. That’s right; assuring integrity and mail authenticity is definitely not a feature offered by the traditional storage solutions and these requirements are the key components in steering more and more companies to consider cloud based email archival solutions these days.
