How To Archive Email

Knowing What To Save & What To Throw Away

For many employees, using email is really only about two things: sending and receiving. But for enterprises as a whole, email is their lifeblood. It is essential to find a way to leverage and manage the data within emails so it can be easily searched and used. There are legal requirements, too, which must be met.

According to Dean Richardson, vice president of sales with ArcMail Technology (www.arcmailtech.com), businesses should archive all email. “You never know which email you will need down the road,” he notes. Companies have saved thousands of dollars by finding just one email.

“We recently used [ArcMail’s] Defender to find a project-related email that probably saved the company $25,000,” says Rosemary Doerner, IT manager at Pinkard Construction.

“Emails should be archived in real time, as this provides a backup of all emails should the user suffer a catastrophic mail server crash and find themselves unable to restore some or all of their email,” Richardson says.

The Ins & Outs Of Archiving

Archiving all of a company’s email in a central archive with fast search/retrieve and export capabilities allows a company to respond to discovery requests solely from its archive, saving the cost and inconvenience of desktop discovery and discovery from mail server backups, which are very time-consuming. And it’s more than just email.

“The size of the company will have a strong bearing on what type of solution should be implemented. SMEs are typically companies with up to 1,000 seats, operating a Microsoft Windows environment possibly with MS Exchange server or running third-party software on the gateway. Thus, the IT administrator needs to identify a solution that can be installed on both exchange and gateway platforms and one that integrates with the company’s existing IT infrastructure such as Active Directory and SQL Server,” notes David Kelleher, global coordinator for GFI Software (www.gfi.com).

Examine questions such as: Will the company increase the number of mailboxes in the medium to long term? Must the company meet compliance requirements? Will it need to leverage SQL as an archiving store (or use NTFS on a separate server)? Can the solution carry out forensic auditing? Does it allow email retrieval on demand?

“SMEs are often cash-strapped with little or no IT budgets. Such limitations impact the email archiving strategy deployed. You need a solution that offers price-performance without affecting functionality. The solution must be user-friendly for both the IT administrator and the employee who needs to use it,” Kelleher says.

“A key trend is the need to archive other ‘unstructured’ data types. Examples are IM, voicemail, office files, etc.,” notes Bob Spurzem, director of product marketing at Mimosa Systems (www.mimosasystems.com). That is because all electronic data that office workers manage on a daily basis are a target for litigation and are largely unmanaged by organizations.

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Source: Processor