Email archiving is a repository mostly kept in a non-productive environment to supply secure preservation of email for compliance and functional aims. Hence, a ‘true’ email archiving system automatically pulls out message contents and attachments from incoming/outgoing emails and it stores them in read-only format after indexing. The purpose of this is to make sure that archived records preserve their original aspect.
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.
