The benefits of email archiving far outweigh the risks, we discuss both and also how to minimise risk and maximise effectiveness.
Benefits of Email Archives
- Email archives often make business and IT operations more efficient and cost-effective.
- Email archives can be useful—and are often necessary—for enforcing regulatory or other legal requirements relating to the retention of records.
- Email archives can help consolidate email in a central location. This can make managing, searching and collecting relevant email more efficient and cost effective.
- Email archives can facilitate the implementation and management of legal holds. These systems minimize the risk of loss of data necessary for legal purposes by placing control of such data in the hands of the organization, rather than the individual.
Risks of Email Archives
- The functionality promoted by many providers has often been tested only on a small volume of data. Organizations email archivefrequently find that when such systems are subjected to data volumes typically found in large organizations, functionality is lost or its effectiveness is decreased.
- The idea of retaining all email and reducing the risk of loss may be appealing, until you consider the implications. The volume of email can quickly become unmanageable. And the mantra that “storage is cheap” is simply not accurate. Storage is not cheap when an organization is retaining all email, nor is it cheap to manage that data and the resulting risks of keeping the data longer than is needed for business or legal reasons.
- Much of the data flowing through an organization’s systems is not needed for either business or legal reasons. But an email archive does not make substantive judgments about whether a particular message is critical to business operations, or is just junk.
- Limitations in email archive technology often do not allow for easy deletion or extraction of data. Being able to retain data easily where necessary is helpful, but only if you can manage the data after it has been ingested into the email archive just as easily.
Read more at http://www.waterfordtechnologies.com/blog/email-archiving/managing-risks-costs-email-archives/