How to deploy an email archiving solution within your organization
To a medium or large business, email correspondence is not something taken lightly or casually deleted after being read. In fact, most serious businesses keep all email for future reference, in the event of disputes, lawsuits, law enforcement subpoenas, to find customer registrations when customers lose their registration codes, to have a record of interchanges between customers and support staff, etc.
The safe storage of read email requires some forethought. Disasters can and do happen, affecting workstation computers, file servers, in-house mail servers and buildings housing the infrastructure. To safely keep thousands of important email messages from harms way, and in some cases to comply with Government regulations, companies are looking for safe storage and archiving solutions. This article gives you some insight into some options you should consider, if you are tasked with finding an email archiving solution for your company.
The process to deploy an email archiving solution can be broken down into concise steps, for both cloud-based offerings and in-house solutions. Below are some of these steps:
- Meet with your stakeholders
Email archiving solutions should help you meet legal, regulatory, and HR requirements; information security concerns; and likely existing document retention policies.
- Estimate the size of the solution
An in-house solution's most significant factor will be the amount of disk space required to store the archives. An outsourced solution's most significant factor will be the number of users. Estimate both, based on current sizes, projected growth of the company, and the feedback from the stakeholders regarding the length of time messages must be stored. I like to take this number and apply the Pi factor to it, which means I multiply the result by 3.14 to account for unanticipated growth. Use this to estimate the costs for your solution and include it in #3 below.
- Determine whether you will deploy an in-house or cloud-based solution
While most companies maintain email archives on-premises, some SMEs are looking at outsourcing as an attractive alternative. Cloud-based solutions are good for meeting e-discovery purposes. For those who want a more full-rounded solution that helps them not only meet legal requirements but also offload Exchange and get rid of PST files, than on-premise is the way to go. Others may prefer a combination of both on-premise and on-line, enabling them to split the archive for rarely accessed email (on-line) and current content (on-premise).
- Plan for client deployment
Some solutions require an agent to be installed on the client, and almost all companies will need to address the PST files that are no doubt scattered all over home drives, local disks in the case of laptops, and may even be on personal external storage. One benefit of an email archiving solution is that it reduces the need for PST files, and many archiving solutions include automatic imports of PSTs to the archive to ensure data is preserved and available. Better solutions enable users to search the archives and restore the email they may have deleted from their mailbox, so decide whether to use a portal, an Outlook plug-in, or both.
- Pilot the solution
Once you have chosen your solution, start by archiving a pilot group of users. Solicit regular feedback from these users on performance, ease of use, and their experiences with searches, restoring deleted emails, etc. Use their feedback to tune the system and to develop any training or informational materials for sharing with the rest of the company.
- Deploy the solution to all users
Once the pilot users have signed off on the system, deploy to the rest of the company. Monitor for the increase in Internet bandwidth if you deployed a cloud solution, or with disk i/o if you went with an in-house option, to ensure that the system is performing well.
Following these six steps will help to ensure a successful deployment of your email archiving solution, whether it is an in-house or outsourced solution. By including input from key stakeholders, getting feedback from your test users, and testing the solution with your existing systems, you will find email archiving to be a great addition to your email infrastructure.
This guest post was provided by Ed Fisher 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. More information: GFI email archiving solution. The preamble was written by Wiz Feinberg, owner of Wizcrafts Computer Services and this blog.
If you like this article please share it.
The content on this blog may be reprinted provided you do not modify the content and that you give credit to Wizcrafts and provide a link back to the blog home page, or individual blog articles you wish to reprint. Commercial use, or derivative work requires written permission from the author.