Why Email Archiving Is an Essential Part of Email Management

Why should email archiving be an important part of your company's email management?

Email is an intrinsic part of business communications and today is often the primary means of doing business with customers and communicating internally. Email is also a huge source of corporate and confidential data.

In a fast-paced environment, it's important to have a reliable email system in place as a well as a comprehensive email management strategy to minimize downtime, limit help desk calls, achieve compliance and, have a backup plan should anything go wrong.

One important facet of every email management strategy should be email archiving.

With most administrators imposing email quotas on their Exchange server because of storage restrictions and performance issues, employees tend to use Outlook's 'Auto-Archive' function to create PST files. This is often a problematic approach to email management because the administrator either has little control over the locations of the PST files (in some folder on the PC) or they are stored in a network share (with the resultant impact on storage space). Searching for old emails or conversations can be a major undertaking. Administrators simply do not have the time to search individual machines for missing PSTs and, if that PST is corrupt, go through the process to restore that file. If those emails are required for compliance or audit reasons, the administrator will be very concerned - what happens if the email cannot be located?

In small networks where the administrator has a lot more control, PSTs may be acceptable if there is a strict PST policy in place - but not in larger environments. The task to manage PSTs will reach a point where the admin has little control, PSTs are all over the place and the risk of email being lost or corrupted grows exponentially.

One way to address this set of problems and keep everyone happy is to take email storage off the Exchange Server and out of PSTs. This is achieved through email archiving. Administrators will have full control over how and where emails are stored and saved, emails are offloaded from the Exchange server and should the need arise, search for email from on single location with ease. Users, on the other hand, do not have to worry about deleting emails when their quota is reached because every email is stored for them in a central location, easily accessible via a web interface or through their email client (with the appropriate connector to the database).

While this addresses performance, storage and data loss issues, email archiving also makes the legal department happy because they know that all corporate email is stored in a central repository, is secure and easily searchable.

Email archiving is one element of your email management strategy. There are other important steps such as implementing antivirus and anti-spam at the gateway and on the Exchange Server.

In this post we have outlined how email archiving is a fundamental tool for administrators to manage their email infrastructure and to comprehensively deal with email storage issues, email compliance and e-Discovery, business records, and Exchange server performance.

This guest post was provided by Christina Goggi on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Read more on email management.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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