Why organizations need an email archiving system

Emails are a standard and vital means of communication in today’s organizations, used to communicate internally between colleagues and management, as well as for external contact with suppliers and clients. This medium is heavily relied upon for work to continue smoothly on a day-to-day basis; however, this reliance on emails has led to end users taking the service for granted and ignoring the storage problems that the sheer amounts of emails generate on a daily basis.

Email archiving is one of the first steps to a successful email management program. It has become a standard procedure in most organizations, especially due to recent compliance regulations and legislation which have made email archiving obligatory. Emails are considered to be legal documents in a court of law and organizations need to be able to provide any requested emails and prove that these have not been tampered with in case of legal proceedings; failure to do so by organizations can lead to hefty fines that could cripple a business.

Maintaining an archive of all the company’s email correspondence, makes them easily searchable and recoverable, and therefore reduces the dependence on PST files that can easily get corrupted and cannot guarantee secure backups of email data. A good email archiving software also eliminates the responsibility from workers having to decide which emails are important and worth keeping, and simply keeps a log of all email correspondence. Therefore even if an employee deletes emails from their user account the archiving server would still have a copy of it stored. This could also come in useful for the human resources department who may have to deal with dismissal or harassment cases where there could be important evidence on email.

Large volumes of email correspondence, increased storage limitations, government regulations and potential legal implications have made the need for email archiving a critical issue for any company.

GFI MailArchiver for Exchange provides easy-to-use corporate email archiving for SMBs, providing administrators with the tools to let their users archive and recover past emails through Outlook or through a web interface. GFI MailArchiver also helps meet the requirements of email retention policies (such as Sarbanes-Oxley) and helps fulfill regulatory email storage requirements.

Author: Giselle Borg Olivier, GFI Software