Email archiving offers several key benefits over email backups. In contrast to a backup, an email archive is a searchable database of old emails that no longer need to be accessed regularly, but cannot be deleted due to email retention laws.
Email archives can be quickly searched and allow single or groups of emails to be quickly retrieved. If a freedom of information request or a legal discovery request is received, finding all relevant emails in a backup could take days or weeks. With email archiving, they can be quickly recalled.
The same applies when access requests or erasure requests are received under the EU´s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As well as helping manage requests efficiently, an email archiving solution helps businesses comply with GDPR encryption, data storage and access control regulations.
While it is possible to store an email archive locally or on a mail server, many companies are taking advantage of the cloud and are storing their archives with a solution provider. Cloud-based services do not require any server space for storage, reducing hardware and maintenance costs.
This category contains the latest news and advice on email archiving, including new legislation and industry-specific news on email retention and information on cloud-based archiving services.
Many businesses fail to understand the importance of implementing an email archiving solution and believe that since they have a backup system for email that allows them to recover data in the event of a disaster – whether that is an accidentally deleted email or ransomware attack – email archiving is not so important.
Why You Need Email Backups and an Email Archive
There is an important case for implementing an email archiving solution in addition to a backup. Backups are vital but they are not effective long-term data storage solutions. If searches need to be performed and emails found and recovered quickly, backups are not particularly useful. Finding specific data in a collection of backup tapes can be a hugely time-consuming process and potentially an almost impossible task if businesses have a lot of employees and old emails need to be recovered.
The primary purpose of backups is disaster recovery. In the event of a ransomware attack, for instance, the last known backup before the attack can be used to recover email data. That is likely to be the backup take from the day before the attack occurred. Those backups are easy to find, and while restoring all email data will not be a very quick job, email data will be able to be recovered provided backups have not also been encrypted. It should be pointed out that ransomware gangs search for backups and will encrypt them too. Backups are also useful for storing email data from individuals when they leave the company. A backup of their email can be made, with the .pst file able to be loaded if ever there are any queries. If you need to find an accidentally deleted email, recovering it from a backup – provided it was only recently deleted – is fairly painless. All businesses need to back up their emails for these reasons, so why is an email archive necessary?
Email archives can also be used for disaster recovery processes, although email archives are not supposed to replace backups. Email archiving should occur in addition to making regular backups of email data. Email archives are important for compliance, audits, and when legal issues arise, and for finding emails when investigating customer complaints and security breaches. A great deal of valuable time can be wasted on these tasks if there is no email archive, or if email archiving has not been correctly implemented.
Rapid Search and Retrieval of all Emails
The reason why archives are so useful for long-term storage of email is they allow searches to be quickly performed on email data. Before being sent to an archive, emails are categorized and data in the emails are tagged. Emails are stored with the metadata associated with the emails intact, and that information can be rapidly searched. You can conduct searches quickly based on individual senders and receivers, groups or departments, dates, and other key information. Finding that information in multiple backups, especially searches that date back several years, is not practical.
Businesses need to comply with data retention laws, and the retention times can differ based on the types of data. Automating data retention is straightforward with email archives due to the tagging of data. It is possible to set data retention times and automate the process of archiving, retention, and deletion to meet compliance requirements, with very little user effort required.
Benefits of a Cloud Email Archive
Businesses may prefer to archive their emails locally, but there are potential problems with this approach. Storage space can easily run out given the volume of emails that need to be kept, and new hardware may need to be purchased to accommodate the archive. Archives will also need to be backed up and the backups stored securely. Many businesses choose to archive their emails in the cloud, as they will never run out of storage space, do not need to purchase and maintain the hardware, and their archives will be automatically backed up.
Cloud-based archives, such as those created with ArcTitan, are optimized to make searches fast. ArcTitan allows multiple searches to be performed simultaneously, unlike several other popular email archiving solutions. That means searching archives is a very quick process. ArcTitan also ensures that emails can be tagged and categorized, further speeding up message search and retrieval.
With ArcTitan, security is assured. Archives are automatically backed up, the archives are always due to replication across multiple data centers, and controls can be applied to restrict access to only the individuals who need to access the archives to prevent external cyberattacks and insider incidents. In the event of a ransomware attack, all emails stored in the cloud archive will be protected so that ransomware gangs will not be able to access and encrypt the archive.
Businesses need to back up their data, but they should also have an email archive. With ArcTitan, email archiving is made simple, and if ever emails need to be recovered, they can be quickly and easily found and recovered.
TitanHQ has announced that three of its cybersecurity solutions have been named winners at the 2021 Expert Insights’ Best-Of” Awards, beating some of the best-known email security, web security, and email archiving products on the market.
For more than 25 years, TitanHQ has been developing innovative cybersecurity solutions to protect businesses from email and web-based threats to their networks and data. TitanHQ’s multi-award-winning products are used by more than 8,500 businesses in over 150 countries, and 2,500 Managed Service Providers (MSPs) offer TitanHQ solutions to their customers to protect them from phishing, malware, ransomware, botnets, viruses, and other cyber threats.
Expert Insights is a respected website that was created in 2018 to help businesses research and select the best cybersecurity solutions to protect their networks and data from cyber threats. Through impartial product reviews, advice from cybersecurity experts, and industry analysis, IT leaders can discover the best cybersecurity solutions to meet their unique needs. The website helps more than 40,000 businesses a month with their research into cybersecurity products and services.
Each year, Expert Insights recognizes the leading cybersecurity service and solution providers and their products at the Expert Insights’ Best-Of” Awards. Technical experts with decades of experience in the cybersecurity industry assess products based on several factors, including ease of use, range of features, the protection provided, and market position, as well as how each product is rated by verified business users. The top products then receive an Expert Insights’ Best-Of” Award.
This year, TitanHQ was recognized by Expert Insights for the powerful threat protection provided by its products, the ease-of-use of the solutions, and their cost-effectiveness, which is why the solutions have proven to be so popular with enterprises, SMBs and MSPs looking for comprehensive protection against email and web-based threats.
“2020 was an unprecedented year of cybersecurity challenges, with a rapid rise in remote working causing a massive acceleration in cybercrime,” said Expert Insights CEO and Founder Craig MacAlpine. “Expert Insights’ Best-Of awards are designed to recognize innovative cybersecurity providers like TitanHQ that have developed powerful solutions to keep businesses safe against increasingly sophisticated cybercrime.”
WebTitan, TitanHQ’s powerful DNS-filtering solution was named a winner in the Web Security category, the SpamTitan anti-phishing and anti-spam solution was named a winner in the Email Security Gateway category, and ArcTitan was named a winner in the Email Archiving category.
“The recent pandemic and the growth of remote working initiatives have further highlighted the need for multiple layers of cybersecurity and our award-winning solutions form key pillars in this security strategy,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO, TitanHQ. “We will continue to innovate and provide solutions that MSPs can use to deliver a consistent, secure and reliable experience to their customers.”
Email retention laws in the United States require businesses to keep copies of emails for many years. There are federal laws that apply to all businesses and organizations, data retention laws for specific industries, and a swathe of email retention laws in the United States at the individual state level. Ensuring compliance with all the appropriate email retention laws in the United States is essential. Non-compliance can prove incredibly costly. Multi-million-dollar fines await any organization found to have breached federal, industry, or state regulations.
Email archiving is absolutely necessary as a result of these federal, state and industry email retention laws. Retention periods vary depending on the regulations that govern your industry sector. Email retention laws require all organizations to quickly execute a legal hold on archived email and provide data in the case of litigation.
All electronic documents must be retained by U.S organizations, which extends to email, in case the information is required by the courts. eDiscovery requests often require large volumes of data to be provided for use in lawsuits and the failure to provide the data can land an organization in serious trouble. Failure to present the requested email can result in hefty fines, sanctions and reputational damage.
For decades, U.S organizations have been required to store documents. Document retention laws are included in numerous legislative acts such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Executive Order 11246 of 1965, the Freedom of Information Act of 1967, the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, and the Reform and Control Act of 1986 to name but a few; however, just over a decade ago, data retention laws in the United States were updated to expand the definition of documents to include electronic communications such as emails and email attachments.
To improve awareness of the many different email retention laws in the United States, a summary of the minimum email retention periods have been included below as a guide. Please bear in mind that this is for information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Industry and federal electronic data and email retention laws in the United States are also subject to change. Up to date information should be obtained from your legal team.
What are the Different Email Retention Laws in the United States?
As you can see from the list below, there are several federal and industry-specific laws applying to email retention in the United States. These email retention regulations apply to emails received and sent, and include internal as well as external emails and email attachments.
Email retention law
Who it applies to
How long emails must be stored
IRS Regulations
All companies
7 Years
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
Federal, state, and local agencies
3 Years
Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX)
All public companies
7 Years
Department of Defense (DOD) Regulations
DOD contractors
3 Years
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Regulations
Telecommunications companies
2 Years
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Regulations
Banks
5 Years
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Regulations
Pharmaceutical firms, food manufacturers, food storage and distribution firms, manufacturers of biological products
Minimum of 5 years rising to 35 years
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
Banks and Financial Institutions
7 Years
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
Healthcare organizations (Healthcare providers, health insurers, healthcare clearinghouses and business associates of covered entities)
6 Years
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
Credit card companies and credit card processing organizations
1 Year
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Regulations
Email retention laws in the United States that are applied by each of the 50 states are beyond the scope of this article. There area also European laws, such as the GDPR email requirements, that must be considered if you do business with EU residents.
Reduce storage space, eliminate mailbox quotas and improve email server performance.
What is the Best Way to Store Old Emails?
Storing emails for a few years is not likely to require masses of storage for a small business with a couple of members of staff. However, the more employees an organization has, the greater the need for extensive resources just to store emails. The average size of a business email may only be 10KB, but multiply that by 123 – the average number of emails sent and received each day by an average business user in 2016 (Radicati email statistics report 2015-2019), and by 365 days in each year, and by the number of years that those emails need to be stored, and the storage requirements become considerable.
If any emails ever need to be accessed, it is essential that any email archive or backup can be searched. In the case of standard backups, that is likely to be an incredibly time consuming process. Backups are not designed to be searched. Finding the right backup alone can be almost impossible, let along finding all emails sent to, or received from, a specific company or individual. Backups have their uses, but they are not suitable for businesses for email retention purposes.
For that, an email archive is required. Email archives contain structured email data that can easily be searched. If ever an eDiscovery order is received, finding all email correspondence is a quick and easy task. Since many email archives are cloud based, messages are deduplicated, and files are compressed, they also do not require huge storage resources. Emails are stored in the cloud, with the space provided by the service provider.
Increasing Dependence on Email
Number of emails sent and received daily in 2020: 306.4 billion (Radicati)
Amount of business-critical data residing in emails: 60 percent (IDC)
With the rise of remote working, the reliance on business email has grown. More than ever users are treating their inbox as an archive to find documents or information. Email is a centralized store of sensitive data. Consequently, companies use email as a form of information retention, referring back to old emails to find vital information.
ArcTitan: TitanHQ’s Cost Effective and Convenient Email Archiving Solution
ArcTitan incorporates a range of security protections to ensure stored data is kept 100% secure and confidential, with email data encrypted in transit and at rest in Replicated Persistent Storage, with the archive automatically backed up for you.
In contrast to many email archiving solutions, ArcTitan is fast. The solution can process 200 emails per second from your email server and archived emails can be retrieved instantly via a browser or Outlook (using a plugin) or other mail clients. Emails can be archived from any location, whether in the office or on the go via a laptop or tablet. Multiple searches of the archive can be performed simultaneously with up to 30 million emails searched per second. There are no limits on storage space or the number of users and the solution can be scaled up to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes.
Ensuring email archive searchs are performed without hurting network performance and keeping data integrity intact are priorities for most businesses. ArcTitan makes eDiscovery easy for attorneys while simultaneously protecting data.
Data Compliance Considerations When Archiving Email with Remote Working
Last year saw a huge increase in remote working, the pandemic has significantly changed the technology and business landscape. As workers worldwide connects remotely, organizations must ensure that data compliance, security, and privacy is ensured. Cloud-based email archiving offers a cost-effective and efficient way to manage email data across a remote workforce.
A key benefit of cloud-based email archiving is the centralization of disparate email servers. With the ongoing move to remote working, this is even more important. Cloud-based email archiving offers a way to consolidate and manage the data held in business emails, while ensuring compliance across disparate working environments.
Main Features of ArcTitan
Scalable, email archiving that grows with your business
Email data stored securely in the cloud on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3
Lightning fast searches – Search 30 million emails a second
Rapid archiving at up to 200 emails a second
Automatic backups of the archive
Email archiving with no impact on network performance
Ensure an exact, tamper-proof copy of all emails is retained
Easy data retrieval for eDiscovery
Protection for email from cyberattacks
Eliminate PSTs and other security risks
Facilitates policy-based access rights and role-based access
Only pay for active users
Slashes the time and cost of eDiscovery other formal searches
Migration tools to ensure the integrity of data during transfer
Seamless integration with Outlook
Supports single sign-on
Save and combine searches
Perform multiple searches simultaneously
Limits IT department involvement in finding lost email – users can access their own archived email
Compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, etc.
ArcTitan email archiving reduces storage space, eliminates mailbox quotas, and improve email server performance. Email archives allows users to clear their inboxes without deleting emails and creates a tamper-proof, repository for emails to meet compliance requirements and discovery requests.
Email Retention Laws in the United States FAQ
Is it difficult to change email archiving providers?
With ArcTitan you can important data in a wide range of formats, including from your legacy email archiving environment. Some email archiving providers use proprietary data formats which can make changing provider difficult. ArcTitan uses no proprietary formats. You can export data in all common formats should you ever wish to move your archive.
How does the GDPR affect email archiving?
The GDPR permits email data to be retained if the data is processed for archiving purposes. E.U. citizens can submit requests to access their data or have their data deleted, which is why an email archive is important for compliance. It allows personal data to be quickly found if requests are received.
How long do I need to archive emails?
This is between 1 to 7 years, although some email data may need to be kept indefinitely. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requires email data to be kept for 1 year, whereas HIPAA, SOX, and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act require certain types of email data to be retained for 7 years.
Will any email archiving solution ensure compliance?
No - to be compliant, an email archiving solution must archive emails in an unchanged form, store emails in a tamper proof repository, encrypt emails in transit, encrypt email data at rest, and allow emails to be restored in their original form.
Do I need to continue paying for inactive mailboxes?
Some email archiving providers require you to continue paying for mailboxes and storage even if an employee leaves the company. With ArcTitan, you only pay for active users, even if you still need to store archived email data associated with inactive mailboxes.
What is the difference between a email archive and a backup?
An email archive is an archive used for long term email storage and an email backup is used for short to medium-term storage for disaster recovery. Backups aren't easily searchable wheras email archives can be searched, and individual emails can be quickly found and restored.
Can I search inside archived email attachments?
With ArcTitan you can search emails across the entire organization, within departments/user groups, or individual mailboxes. You can also search inside all common email attachment types, including Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, OpenOffice documents, as well as PDFs, RTFs, ZIP files, and many more.
How can I migrate my email archive to ArcTitan?
Migration of an existing archive to ArcTitan is a straightforward process and assistance will be provided. You can use a cutover migration – a straight transfer from an existing provider, perform a staged migration if you have a very large archive to minimize disruption, or a hybrid migration of you want to have a physical and virtual server.
One of the most common misconceptions about email archiving is that an email archive is the same as a backup, but there are some important differences. In this post we explain those differences and why your business needs to be archiving emails as well as creating email backups.
In the event of disaster, you need to be able to recover your data and the same is true of emails. A huge quantity of important information is saved in email accounts and businesses cannot afford to lose all that data. In the event of disaster, a ransomware attack for instance, without some form of backup, all of your email data will be permanently lost. In the case of a ransomware attack, you can pay the ransom and the attackers may supply viable keys to decrypt your data but there is no guarantee that they will make good on their promise. You must have a backup plan, and that is an email backup.
Email accounts can be restored to a particular moment in time from a backup file, and emails can be recovered with little to no data loss. From a business perspective, your backups may not need to be retained for very long. Their primary purpose is to allow data recovery in the event of disaster, and they will be replaced with a new backup.
Backups are designed to restore entire mailboxes. Problems arise if you need to recover a single email that has been accidentally deleted, if you need to respond to a request to have a person’s data deleted in its entirety to comply with GDPR, or if you get an eDiscovery request or have to produce emails to settle disputes. You may also need to review emails to determine if there has been a data breach or to investigate potential malicious insiders. In all of these cases, backups fall short as they are not designed to be searched.
Email archives are different. An email archive can be viewed as an extension of an inbox, where searches for individual emails can be performed and messages can be quickly recovered when needed. Every sent and received email is sent to the archive and is stored along with metadata, which allows searches to be performed. In fact, searching an email archive is almost as easy as searching for a message in an inbox.
If you wanted to restore emails from a particular moment in time, say last year, restoring data from your backup could easily result in loss of current email data. With the restoration of data from an email archive that would not occur. Many businesses only discover the difference between an email archive and a backup when they need to deal with one of the above situations. By then it is too late.
You should also bear in mind that businesses have a legal responsibility to preserve their emails, even in industries that are not highly regulated. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the United States were updated in 2006 to include electronic communications, which require email data to be produced in the event of legal action. Further, an audit trail must be maintained, email data must be protected against accidental loss or deliberate tampering, and data must be immediately available. An archive allows this, a backup does not. The failure to produce information can result in a heavy fine and could well be the difference between winning and losing a case.
ArcTitan: Cost Effective Cloud Email Archiving for SMBs and MSPs
TitanHQ offers a lightning fast, email archiving solution that ensures that you will never lose an email again. ArcTitan is a set and forget email archiving solution that serves as a black box flight recorder for email. All emails sent and received by your business will be automatically sent to the archive for long term email storage, freeing up space on your mail server and improving performance. Set your email archiving policy, email retention periods, and your emails will be encrypted in transit to the archive and at rest and stored on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3. Your archive will be automatically backed up to ensure that come what may you can recover your emails.
When you need to find an email, receive an eDiscovery request, are selected for a compliance audit, or otherwise need to find historic email, searching the archive is simple and fast. You can search up to 30 million emails a second and recovery of emails takes seconds to minutes. ArcTitan facilitates policy-based access rights and role-based access, so you can allow employees to access their own archives, so your IT department will not have to be involved every time an employee misplaces an email.
Key Features of ArcTitan
Scalable, email archiving that grows with your business
Email data stored securely in the cloud on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3
Lightning fast searches – Search 30 million emails a second
Rapid archiving at up to 200 emails a second
Automatic backups of the archive
Email archiving with no impact on network performance
Ensure an exact, tamperproof copy of all emails is retained
Easy data retrieval for eDiscovery
Protection for email from cyberattacks
Eliminate PSTs and other security risks
Facilitates policy-based access rights and role-based access
Only pay for active users
Slashes the time and cost of eDiscovery other formal searches
Migration tools to ensure the integrity of data during transfer
Seamless integration with Outlook
Supports single sign-on
Save and combine searches
Perform multiple searches simultaneously
Limits IT department involvement in finding lost email – users can access their own archived email
Compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, etc.
MSPs looking to offer email archiving to their clients can integrate ArcTitan easily into their own packages with ease or offer the solution as a standalone service. The solution can be provided as a white label to MSPs and resellers to add their own branding.
To find out how easy and cost-effective it is to implement an email archiving solution, call TitanHQ today.
TitanHQ has formed a strategic partnership with the GRIDHEART, which will see TitanHQ’s leading cloud-based email security, web security, and email archiving solutions made available to users of the Cloudmore Cloud Commerce platform.
GRIDHEART is a privately-owned Swedish company that delivers the world’s leading cloud-based solutions through its Cloud Commerce platform, Cloudmore.
For the past 10 years, GRIDHEART has been offering leading cloud solutions to its customers and resellers and now deals with more than 1,000 cloud partners. The Cloudmore platform makes selling cloud services easy and brings a wide range of cloud services together in a single unified platform.
The platform gives users complete centralized control over their cloud solutions and allows them to easily provision new customers, bill for services, automate processes, and obtain pre-and post-sales support. The platform provides a host of management tools to make control of SaaS and cloud computing simple.
The partnership with TitanHQ will see the Galway, Ireland-based cybersecurity firm add its leading cybersecurity solutions to the platform, through which users can manage the solutions for free.
GRIDHEART’s customers will be able to offer their clients the SpamTitan Cloud email security solution, the WebTitan web filtering solution, and the ArcTitan email security solution and provide multi-layered security to protect against email, web, and modern blended threats.
“By offering additional layers of cloud-based security through Cloudmore’ s unique Cloud Commerce platform, MSPs can procure and deploy IT services for their customers and quickly maximize their IT investment, enhance their security stack and lower operational costs for their customers,” said Rocco Donnino, Executive VP of Strategic Alliances at TitanHQ. “This agreement highlights the importance of delivering comprehensive security solutions to the MSP community through a single and powerful platform”
“TitanHQ fits the bill as a perfect partner with their razor focus on advanced threat protection via email and the web. We’ve very happy to have them on board,” said Stefan Jacobson, Sales Director of GRIDHEART.
Today has seen the announcement of a new partnership between TitanHQ – the leading provider of email and web filtering solutions for MSPs – and the international consulting, coaching, and peer group organization HTG. The announcement was made at the Q1 HTG Peer Groups meeting at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak Resort, Phoenix, Arizona.
The partnership sees TitanHQ’s web filtering solution – WebTitan; its cloud-based anti-spam service – SpamTitan; and its email archiving solution – ArcTitan made immediately available to the HTG community.
TitanHQ has developed innovative cybersecurity solutions specifically for managed service providers to help them provide even greater protection to their clients from the ever-increasing volume of email and Internet-based threats. The multiple award-winning solutions have now been adopted by more than 7,500 businesses and 1,500 MSPs, helping to protect them from malware, ransomware, viruses, phishing, botnets, and other cyber threats.
HTG is a leading peer group association that was recently acquired by the global technology giant ConnectWise. HTG helps businesses plan and execute strategies to drive forward growth and increase profits. Its consultants and facilitators share wisdom, provide accountability, and build meaningful relationships with businesses to help them succeed in today’s highly competitive marketplace.
The new partnership will see TitanHQ join HTG Peer Groups as a Gold vendor, making the firm’s MSP-friendly cybersecurity solutions immediately available to the HTG community.
“We’re delighted to welcome TitanHQ on board for 2018. As soon as the initial discussion started we knew they would make a great match for our community, as web security is a key area for our members in 2018,” said HTG Peer Groups founder, Arlin Sorensen.
HTG Peer Groups Founder Arlin Sorensen (Left); TitanHQ CEO Conor Madden (Right)
“WebTitan web filter was built by MSP’s for MSP’s and this exciting relationship with HTG Peer Groups is a continuation of that process. It allows us to listen to the opportunities and difficulties faced by MSP senior executives while also allowing us to share how we became a successful web security vendor. Our goal is to successfully engage with HTG members to build strong and long-lasting relationships,” said TitanHQ CEO, Conor Madden.
Web security is a hot topic within the managed service provider community. MSPs are being called upon to improve web security for their clients and protect against a barrage of phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks. They are also called upon to mitigate malware and ransomware attacks when they are experienced by their clients, which can be time-consuming and costly. By implementing WebTitan, TitanHQ’s award-winning web filtering solution, MSPs can substantially reduce support and engineering costs.
WebTitan serves as a barrier between end users and the Internet, blocking attempts by users to visit malicious websites where malware and ransomware is silently downloaded. WebTitan is also a powerful content filtering solution that can be used to enforce organizations’ acceptable Internet usage policies.
The web filtering solution and TitanHQ’s anti-spam solution SpamTitan have been developed specifically with MSPs in mind. The solutions can be applied and configured in under 30 minutes without the need for additional hardware purchases, software downloads, or site visits. The solutions have a low management overhead which means MSPs can protect their clients from email and web-based threats, reduce the hands-on time they need to spend on their clients and provide greater value while improving their bottom lines.
An enterprise email archiving solution allows emails to be retrieved on demand and ensures messages remain usable. Emails must be produced in the event of an audit and during the legal discovery process. Federal laws require organizations to produce emails, such as when a request is made under the Freedom of Information Act. An email archive is searchable and allows emails to be quickly and easily located and accessed when needed.
Since recovering emails from backups is a long and complicated process, many companies now use an enterprise email archiving solution such as ArcTitan. ArcTitan makes archiving emails a quick and easy process, freeing up valuable storage space on mail servers. Recovering emails is also rapid and straightforward as the archive is searchable. Even large numbers of emails from multiple email accounts can be recovered in minutes. Multiple searches of the archive can be conducted at the same time, in contrast to Office 365 which restricts searches to two at a time, and the archive can be searched at a rate of up to 30 million emails a second. Recovering multiple emails from backups can take several days.
Even though federal laws require emails to be produced on demand, many companies have yet to switch to an email archive and the IRS is not setting a good example. The IRS has recently been discovered to have failed to comply with federal regulations on email storage.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) recently conducted an audit of the Inland Revenue Service and discovered that IRS policies on email storage do not allow it to consistently ensure records are retained, and that in several cases, the IRS has been unable to produce emails on request.
The audit was requested by the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance and the Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means after the IRS reported that it was unable to produce some documents after receiving Freedom of Information requests. After searching for the documents, the IRS discovered documents had been accidentally deleted.
The auditors determined that emails are not automatically archived for all employees and some employees had been instructed to manually store emails on their hard drives or network drives. As a result, some emails and documents were permanently lost when hard drives were damaged or destroyed.
The audit also showed that even though a new executive e-mail retention policy had been introduced that should have resulted in emails being automatically archived, that failed to happen as some executives did not turn on the automatic archiving feature.
Polices on email archiving were also not applied consistently. The IRS was discovered to have failed to follow its own policies on email archiving in more than half of the 30 Freedom of Information requests assessed by auditors. Had an enterprise email archiving solution been used, all documents and emails would have been recoverable and could have been quickly been located.
TIGTA made five recommendations, including the implementation of an enterprise email archiving solution – which is something that all organizations in the United States should consider. In the event of an audit, Freedom of Information request or lawsuit, all relevant emails can be quickly produced and regulatory fines can be avoided.
An Enterprise Archiving Solution will Help IRS´ Compliance with GDPR
The implementation of an enterprise email archiving solution will also help IRS´ compliance with the EU´s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) due to be introduced in May 2018. Under the Regulation, the IRS (and any other US organization maintaining the personal data of EU citizens) have a duty to protect EU citizens´ personal data from loss, theft or unauthorized disclosure.
EU citizens also have the right to request access to personal data held by the IRS and a “right to be forgotten” if the IRS no longer has any lawful basis for retaining the data. TIGTA´s audit of email practices within the IRS could not have been more timely, as – should the IRS be unable to produce an email on request or fail to respond to a data access request within thirty days – the Service could be liable for a fine of up to 4% of global turnover. The IRS collected $3.3 trillion in taxes in 2015.
ArcTitan: Email Archiving Made Simple
ArcTitan is a powerful and fast email archiving solution from TitanHQ that serves as a black box flight recorder for email. All emails sent to the archive for long term storage are de-duplicated and compressed to save on space and to ensure searches can be performed rapidly. Emails are sent to the archive at a rate of 200 a second and searches can be performed at a rate of up to 30 million messages a second. ArcTitan facilitates policy-based access rights and role-based access, with the archive accessible through a web-based interface or via your normal mail client.
ArcTitan is scalable to tens of thousands of users, there is no limit on storage space, and no patching burden as the solution is automatically updated. Backups of the archive are automatic too. ArcTitan allows you to archive emails with no impact on network performance and is truly a set and forget solution that will ensure compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, etc. and will allow you to find and retrieve emails for audits, customer complaints, and eDiscovery requests with ease. There are no proprietary data formats, you can import email from all mail services and servers, and export data in a variety of formats.
If you are looking for an email archiving solution, are not happy with the functionality or cost of your current solution, or have any questions about email archiving or ArcTitan, give the TitanHQ team a call today.
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TitanHQ has announced that three of its cybersecurity solutions have been named winners at the 2021 Expert Insights’ Best-Of” Awards, beating some of the best-known email security, web security, and email archiving products on the market.
