Email plays a vital role in most businesses. It’s used to share ideas, discuss decisions and communicate changes. Without it most businesses couldn’t function. All that means is that email retention is another vital business function. Because emails are vital documents, they need to be retained just like every other important document.
Email archive solutions can help you free up space of emails that don’t need to be accessed day to day but ensure they are safely and securely archived for when you need access to them in line with legal and regulatory requirements.
There are three main methods of email archiving; some suit some businesses more than others depending on the size of the business and the capacity of the emails involved:
Locally – Using mail data files (such as Outlook PSTs) to store data on your local machine. This can be sufficient for one or two users, but any more than that and you’re going to want to move onto some of the more advanced options.
An On-Premise Server – Archiving software is available that sits on your local server capturing emails and then archiving them in a separate database, so important emails can’t get accidentally deleted.
In the Cloud – Hosted solutions allow you to have your email archive stored safely and securely offsite in a data centre. Users have a searchable web based portal that they can login to in order to access archived emails; from here they can be read and re-downloaded in necessary.