You’ve decided to make use of an email archiving solution for your organization. Awesome! That decision can potentially save you a lot in the long run.
But here comes the challenging bit. How do you select the ideal email archiving solution for your organization?
As you know, not all these solutions are created equal. In this article, we discuss email archiving and the features to look out for when choosing the best solutions.
What is Email Archiving?
Email archiving is simply a system for storing email messages in a searchable and safe manner. Having too many emails on the server can prove to be problematic. But with archiving, this can get solved.
Some of the benefits of archiving emails include:
- Storage management
- Legal holds
- Auditing needs
- Knowledge management
- Disaster recovery
- Mail server performance
With the perks above, your organization does not have to wait until its mail servers reach their capacity. Some of the features to look out for in email archiving solutions includes:
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Compatibility
In a normal situation, your email provider can serve as your email archiving solution vendor. If this is impossible, ensure that the vendor you select is compatible with your email client. The vendor you settle for should support many email archiving scenarios. Such could include:
- Deep processing of PST files
- SMTP Journaling
- Microsoft Exchange Server on-premises
- Microsoft office 365
- Policy-based mailbox capture
Ensure that the solution is compatible with all your email capture scenarios. Otherwise, you will experience problems.
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An effective and efficient archiving process
There are numerous ways to archive emails. A single solution may have the ability to only archive emails received outside of the company’s network. Another may archive outgoing and incoming emails, no matter their source.
It is crucial to comprehend your organization’s archiving system needs. How efficient and in-depth should the archival be? Do you plan on storing all email attachments as well? If your organization focuses on compliance, total archival is a must.
Make sure that the solution you select suits your organizational archiving needs.
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Data redundancy
Consider data redundancy at all costs. Ensure that your data spread across numerous data centers, and the more data center usage, the better for your organization.
The solution you select should offer high redundancy levels. Failure to this, your organizational data could be at risk.
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Compliance with government mandates
The email archiving solution you select should comply with all government mandates. If the provider is uncompliant, you risk facing legal issues in the future. Do not risk your organization’s data with a lack of proper email archiving.
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Easy search and retrieval
The email archiving solution you select should be simple. That enables everyone around the organization to navigate and understand the solution effortlessly. Leaving the IT team to access the email access entirely will be daunting. That is especially when they have other duties to perform.
Anyone with access to the repository should effortlessly retrieve or search an email.
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Fast searches
The ideal email archiving solution should not only be effortless to search and retrieve. It should also be fast.
You will likely have thousands of emails in the archive repository. That means that the solution’s search capability should be quick and efficient. It should have the ability to sift through an archive quickly to make retrieval effortless.
If you are taking forever to retrieve to search for unarchived emails, you’ve got the wrong solution!
