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.