Moreover, an email archiving solution will slow down the demand for storage space by decreasing the amount of online emails on the server. Less physical storage space is consumed by email archives rather than other email storage methods.

To ensure that a company has centralized and available copy of all its email, the email archiving solutions adopted an active approach which means providing an xtra protection against accidental or intentional deletion of emails by end users. Whenever litigation support is requested, email archiving gets rid of the need to search for personal archives on each and every local machine likewise.

According to a study conducted by Osterman research, 46%of the companies make use of tape backups to ‘archive’ their emails. It should be noted that performing ‘backup’ and ‘archiving’ serve two distinguished purposes. The difference between backups and archives are as follows : backups are meant to save actual data against the event of failure or disaster whilst archives protect data so that it can be retrieved when required. The cost of looking for the electronic records when doing ‘backups’ for a discovery process can be very expensive since it requires months of IT manpower to wade through backup tapes. On the other hand, email archiving systems provides advanced search and retrieval functions, thus allowing end users track down email messages in a timely and cost effective manner. Therefore, finding an email record without having an effective email archiving solution is worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack. In the case of Murphy Oil USA vs Flour daniel, the defendant was ordered to restore and print the emails contained in 93 tape backups and to absorb the total costs involved to perform this operation amounting to $6.2 million.

Administrators are allowed to set up access restrictions by email archiving systems. As a result, these restrictions guarantees data integrity and privacy in compliance to the statutes as well as security and protection of intellectual property rights.

• They allow users to retain email longer than companies need or want to keep email for.
• When a company has an e-Discovery request or other type of search, because of PSTs, they often have to spend a considerable amount of time and money copying data from employee desktops and laptops and searching through a mountain of information.
• Employees can intentionally (leaving the company) or accidentally (leaving a laptop in the airport) give up the valuable company knowledge in their email to competitors or hackers.
• PST files are typically on PCs that aren’t backed up, exposing the employee and the company to lost information and productivity.
• Many employees copy PST files to network hard drives to ensure they are backed up.  As such, GBs or TBs of redundant email (each PST in a company often contains many duplicate messages since many individuals may have received the same email) clog up shared drives.  Some companies estimate 25% – 60% of shared drive storage and backup comes from PST files.
• In addition, every time a PST file is opened (whether modified or not), it “looks” like a changed file to incremental backup programs.  This means PST backup is highly redundant and inefficient.
• Finally, users often spend considerable time managing PST files themselves.

So let’s get to the root of the issue?  Why do users create PST files?

At the heart of it, one of the fundamental reasons users love PSTs is that it allows them to get around the company mailbox limits often imposed in Microsoft Exchange to keep the email server efficient, fast and easy to backup.  Mailbox “quotas” attempt to solve the email storage problem but instead shift it to the “underground archives” sitting on employee PCs.

If employees instead had an unlimited email archive integrated into their email, controlled by company policies and fully-searchable, PST files become a great deal less relevant.
So to enforce your PST policies, start at the source by eliminating the need for PSTs altogether, get an email archiving solution. Download SophiaEA now clicking HERE.

The legal department’s task is to establish the framework and parameters of the archiving system – which records need to be archived and for how long, and the terms and conditions that govern the stored records (e.g., who has access, what are procedures to be followed, etc.).

The IT department’s task is setting up the infrastructure (including hardware and software support), systems and procedures as well as recruiting and training personnel to oversee the system.

The HRD department’s task, on the other hand, involves training and educating people in the needs, requirements and procedures for email archiving – what to archive, how often it should be done, the systems involved, and so on.

At the end of the line come the systems – as noted, hardware (including the appropriate storage media), software programs, backup systems and procedures, disaster management and so on.

Email archiving is an essential business practice that is often . The legal and financial penalties in not establishing a properly functional email archiving system can be substantial.

Sophia Email Archiver 2.0 has essentially been designed to meet the needs of an email archiving requirement from a legal perspective and systems perspective. Download your trial version now, click Here

At the same time, US courts have issued guidelines on what is called ‘e-discovery’ or exchanging information using electronic means in legal proceedings. The American Bar Association has, in turn, warned lawyers that e-discovery apparently covers all means of electronic communications – including storage media, personal computers, laptops, PDAs, mobile phones, and so on.

Aside from these sources of information, companies must be prepared to show that their records have not been tampered with. In the same way, they should be able to prove – if needed – that their opponent’s records have been tampered with.

The sheer volume of data that email systems generate compounds the problem. Even removal of spam leaves a significant volume of data left over – which have to be filed, stored and maintained in a form and manner that is easy to retrieve and track.

The legal requirements straddle into practical issues. Tracing an email trail (for litigation purposes, for example) often results in time spent and people ‘dedicated’ to a single task – searching through storage media, checking and counter-checking veracity and accuracy of data, and in some cases attempting recovery of information that has been deleted – all under the pressure of heavy penalties in the event of failure. Sophia Email Archiver has been designed to meet above requirements, download your trial today by clicking Here.

I have been involved in situations where customers said that they had been quoted less on products, but I could not prove them wrong as I was deleting all my old emails and by the time they placed their order, I did not have email evidence of the communications or simply could not find it quickly enough to raise issues.

So, why do businesses today need to be archiving their electronic correspondence?

Many transactions in today’s business are now done electronically. There are several thousand emails floating around the Internet at any given second. Phone orders and other forms of queries to be a business are being reduced while the number of email messages is drastically increasing.

With this increase in electronic messages, the possibility of missing messages also increases. This can lead to client frustration and loss of business. Electronic communications can also compromise confidential information and corporate secrets. Finding and defending these problems is why business today needs a great solution for archiving all emails and having a retention plan for keeping these messages.

Compliance and regulatory legislation is now dictating that some lines of business have a strategy of recording every email that comes into a business or leaves a corporate network destined for an external resource. With these new rules affecting many lines of business, it is important for today’s business to have a strategy that is easy to use, robust and, most importantly, secure.

However, regulatory or compliance pressures should not be the main reason for you to look at a solution for archiving all correspondence coming in or leaving your business. As a business owner, you should keep your finger on the pulse of every bit of information circulating around your business.

You need to have an interest in all of this. You need to be able to pull information about a client, an order, and communication string between one of your clients at any time. Your business may one day depend on this– when you are sitting in a court room justifying the actions of one of your employees.

All businesses require a record of transactions that are easy to retrieve. There are many email archiving solutions available to all levels of business; these offer many different periods of archiving, and there are mechanisms that you can employ that range from a minimal investment to those that are quite expensive. SophiaEA has been designed to meet the needs of small and medium enterprises.

Employee abuse of corporate email is at an all time high. Employees need to realize that corporate email is for corporate use only. Make them aware that every email that an employee sends or receives in their corporate email account may be recorded and audited to ensure that all employees are using the corporate resource within the acceptable use guidelines set down by an organization. An email archiving solution can help small business owners ensure productivity remains high by serving as a reminder that corporate email accounts are only used for corporate communications.

All in all, sooner or later, any decent business which makes high use of emails will need to get an email archiving solution in place.

On the other hand, an archiving solution is more a long term plan where emails can be stored over several years and kept readily accessible even if the email has been deleted from the end user point of view. So this is a simple example to demonstrate the necessity and importance of having an email archiving solution.

Sophia Email Archiver has beed designed to address this issue and cater for the needs of small and medium entreprises. Click here to dowload your trial.