An Introduction to Email Archiving
With email being such a vital part of a business’s day-to-day activity and communication, it’s no surprise that many organizations are looking to back-up sent and received messages. Messages often contain important information, such as negotiation details, agreements and customer commitments, while they are also the basis for binding contracts.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that businesses are crying out for effective email archiving solutions to keep a vital record of these kinds of communications, especially with overall data growth expected to grow from 26 per cent to 50 per cent in the next year. In addition to providing storage solutions for vast quantities of emails, what benefits does email archiving provide your business?
Efficient access
Storing hundreds of thousands of emails is one thing, but finding the right one when it’s needed can also be problematic. Furthermore, what happens when you need to find that vital document but you aren’t able to connect to the office-based server due to an outage, or you wish to retrieve a document that has been archived for an important meeting? This is where a cloud-based service, like the one offered by Mimecast Email Archiving, could prove particularly beneficial.
All emails, both internal and external, are easily stored in a secure archive, offering a huge amount of storage space and the ability to access the mailbox anywhere, as long as there is an internet connection and you have a device that can connect to the web. This allows for greater worker productivity, as staff will no longer have to forage around for important documents or call technical support for email access. They can simply log-in and look through their emails in real-time.
Folders can be used to organise emails into an accessible files, while the search function makes it easy to scan for a key phrase or word that is located in the desired document.
Minimising costs, maximising security
The major problems with large storage systems are the costs involved in maintaining them, the need to guard against security issues, and the stretching of company resources and man-power. An email archive in the cloud helps to meet these challenges and solve them in one accessible, simple and unified platform.
Security is perhaps the most pressing issue, due to the risks associated with email viruses and spam. However, a system like Mimecast is extremely resilient, and a number of copies are created of inbound, outbound and internal messages, which are then immediately encrypted and geographically dispersed to ensure no important information is lost forever.
With technology evolving all the time, having to complete data migration and software upgrades can be complicated. However, using an email archiving system in the cloud eliminates these issues without any interruption to existing services. There is almost no limit on the amount of data that can be stored, meaning that regardless of how your business needs grow, there will always be enough capacity to meet them.
Complete integration
Email archiving, as offered by Mimecast, allows you to integrate the solution to Microsoft Outlook, enabling the user to access their personal archive with a familiar email interface. This makes it easy to recover deleted messages that are then restored to Outlook using the ‘drag and drop’ system, providing simple management of your mailbox. The service is already available on Android, Windows Phone, iPhone and Blackberry, ensuring that all major smartphones can take advantage of a cloud-based email platform.
And that concludes our introduction to email archiving. Make sure your business has a solution imminently to help increase your company’s productivity.
