Email archiving is becoming essential for organizations. Sending and receiving messages online is now a vital part of client and staff communication, and emails often hold key bits of information or data that is valuable to your business. This includes client contact details, contracts, and other pieces of confidential information, so having your mailbox secured is a must.
One way to do this is by email archiving, which can be achieved on-site or by taking advantage of the cloud. The latter offers a number of different benefits, such as minimising the need to spend on expensive in-house infrastructure to hold vast amounts of data. Setting up and maintaining an archive on-premises could also be a drain on IT resources, as well as finances.
Here are three things you should NOT do when trying to manage your email archiving system.
Leave it to the IT department
While the IT staff will be able to help with the running of an email archive, there are a number of things that should be discussed by representatives from different departments. This includes setting up a policy for email records and management that is specific to your business and driven by its needs.
Furthermore, if you ask the IT staff to come up with an archiving system of their own, it will cost more money to upgrade and update the system when changes in technology occur. This will have a drain on not only finances, but resources and efficiency too.
Neglect security
When you have your archive in place, it is important to ensure all possible steps are taken to protect it. Your archive will hold a number of documents that could cause reputational, financial or legal damage if they were lost or fell into the wrong hands. Therefore, in addition to your email archiving system, it is advised that an email management service is also integrated.
For example, Email Management with Mimecast delivers a platform that seamlessly fits with your email provider, such as Microsoft Outlook, to provide excellent data security by encrypting and triplicating files, which are then geographically dispersed. This service also incorporates a number of complex and costly systems into one cloud-based platform, making it simpler to use while minimising the drain on resources, thus increasing productivity.
Fail to plan ahead
With the amount of email communication and online document sharing set to increase in the coming years, it is important to assess whether or not your current storage capacity is able to deal with this. Without the correct infrastructure in place, you will not be able to archive all important emails and could be forced to delete a number of documents. This could cause operational delays and a further drain on resources, which is not good for a company’s reputation. Imagine if your business suddenly made a large acquisition, but you didn’t have the capability to store vital details.
Switching to the cloud and an email management service means your business can benefit from a virtually ‘bottomless’ inbox, allowing you to continue to store and back up information without overcrowding your internal server. Taking advantage of the cloud also means this can be achieved at a lower cost than investing in more capacity.