An email archive is important for compliance, but there are also several departmental benefits of email archiving. The improvements in efficiency as a result of implementing an email archiving solution can deliver cost savings and ease the burden on your workforce, with the benefits felt by al employees in your organization.
Most businesses choose to implement an email archiving solution to ensure emails can be found and quickly produced in the event of HR issues, customer disputes, legal actions, and to comply with federal, state, and industry regulations.
An email archive acts as a black box flight recorder for email. All emails that need to be retained are sent to the archive for long term storage. In the event of a compliance audit or eDiscovery request, the archive can be quickly searched, and important emails can be found and exported in minutes. An email archive is also important for disaster recovery, allowing business-critical emails to be recovered in the event of corruption, deletion or a cyberattack.
Businesses that implement an email archiving solution often discover there are many other benefits that come from the secure archiving of emails in a dedicated repository, separate from the mail server.
Email Archiving Benefits for the IT Department
Some of the biggest benefits are enjoyed by the IT department. Storing the millions of emails that are sent and received by the organization, along with their attachments, can consume a lot of expensive storage space. Email archiving solutions deduplicate emails before they are sent to the archive and will only store one copy of a message. The removal of duplicates and compression of data greatly reduces storage space resulting in significant cost savings.
The IT support team will undoubtedly receive many requests from employees to recover important emails that have been misfiled or accidentally deleted. Many email archiving solutions can be configured to allow employees to access their own archives. When an email is lost, or is accidentally deleted, the employee can search their own archive for the missing email without bothering the IT department. The same is true for HR investigations, which will no longer need to involve the IT department to such a large degree.
By sending emails to the archive, they do not need to be stored locally in PST files or on the mail server. PST files are a security risk and are a management headache that can be avoided. An email archive saves considerable maintenance time and freeing up space on the mail server improves performance. In the event of disaster, such as hardware failure or a cyberattack, emails can be quickly and easily restored from the archive, saving the IT department considerable time which can be put to much better use.
Benefits of Email Archiving for the HR and Legal Departments
When there are employee disputes, email investigations need to be conducted. That involves the HR department contacting the IT department to get them to find the emails that have been sent or received by a particular employee. HR departments will not have to wait for a busy IT department to respond and can simply search for the emails they need in the archive.
An archive will help to ensure compliance and if an eDiscovery request is received, rather than taking hours or days to compile all the necessary email data, the eDiscovery process is a quick and easy. An email archive ensures there is an immutable record of emails, which is essential in any legal actions. The legal department can be 100% sure that emails will not have been accidentally deleted, and since a full audit trail is maintained, access attempts can easily be identified along with any attempted changes to email content. Email archiving can save hours of time, which can be put to more productive uses.
Benefits for All Employees
A study conducted by Adobe found that employees spend a huge amount of their time on email. In 2019, a typical employee spent around 5 hours a day checking their email accounts. Emails are often misplaced or are accidentally deleted, resulting in productivity losses. Being able to access their own archives means employees will never lose an email, as a quick search can easily be performed on the archive.
Employees can prove that they sent or did not receive an email, access to emails is much faster, inboxes are easier to clear, and searches are more efficient.
ArcTitan Cloud – Secure Email Archiving with Lightning Fast Searches
ArcTitan Cloud is a 100% cloud-based, secure email archiving service from TitanHQ. ArcTitan is fully compliant with HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and other key regulations that have data retention requirements.
ArcTitan stores a copy of every message that is sent and received by your organization (subject to user-defined policies). The archive is self-maintaining and self-healing, which ensures a reliable service with minimal or no disruption during an outage. The archive is stored securely on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3, and the archive is automatically backed up to prevent data loss. All data are encrypted at rest and in transit, with strong authentication controls to prevent unauthorized access.
A set and forget solution, ArcTitan ensures that emails will never be lost again. When you need to perform a search and find emails, searching is lightning fast. A search of 30 million messages takes less than a second.
If you are not currently archiving your emails, take advantage of a free demonstration of ArcTitan to find out more about how the solution can help your business. If you are already archiving and are unhappy with your current provider, give the TitanHQ team a call to find how much you can save by switching provider and the additional benefits that ArcTitan offers.