Email Archiving Solutions

Today email is a quintessential part of our everyday lives. We cannot live without email, or so it seems. Corporate setups rely entirely on email for internal and external communication. They may also need to preserve the email for compliance with Data Protection Acts. Despite its high adoption rate, email usage is not without its problems. A primary concern is storage space to store all the email that seems to shoot through the roof in volume.

While viruses and spam are also concerns, the primary concern is where to store all the email. Corporate users have turned their email inboxes into filing cabinets with email neatly tucked away into folders. But there is a limit to how big an email inbox can grow.

How can I combat the storage issue?

Today's email clients like Microsoft Outlook allow the user to auto-preview incoming mails making it only too easy for employees to file them away without reading them fully or acting upon them. The result is a slowing mail server with mailboxes that are overflowing in size. While IT administrators can set policies on mailbox growth limits, they are limited by the tools available at their disposal. The tips that can be used to combat the email storage issue are as follows.

1. Use Auto Archiving - Some mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook include a feature known as 'auto archiving' that stores old e-mails into a local file (PST), thus reducing the size of the "main" mailbox. This older technology again puts the responsibility to store emails in the hands of the end users.

2. Make users manually trim their mailboxes - There is no sure way to accomplish this as it needs cooperation from the end users and users often find it difficult to distinguish between mails they need to keep and mails that they don't.

3. Use an archiving solution such as Symantec Vault (formerly Veritas Enterprise Vault).

This solution is very manageable as it moves the responsibility of safe maintenance of important email to the IT support team.

The Symantec Vault suite provides a flexible archiving framework suitable for e-mail, file and web content. It enables automatic and intelligent discovery of the content within these formats, while reducing storage costs and simplifying data management. It sports powerful search capabilities and features client applications for risk management, corporate governance and legal protection. Some of the essential features include:

1. Automatic content lifecycle management for all corporate data including e-mail

2. Storage optimization reduces storage needs by up to 50 percent or more.

3. Seamless integration of archived e-mail with existing mail systems while still remaining transparent to the user

4. Ensures compliance with data retention policies by acting as a secure repository for electronic data.

5. Provides an 'information warehouse' for corporate data that can be used for data mining as a knowledge resource using indexing and searching technologies

6. Reduces the cost of content recovery and administration.

7. Easy and speedy search and retrieval of content allows end-users to tap into organizational knowledge.

What are the next steps?

1. Understand the goals you are trying to achieve when investing in an email and corporate data archiving solution.

2. Consider how an archiving solution will affect your end users and what changes in work practices and workflow, if any, are needed to be followed.

3. Decide the type of e-mail archiving solution that is most suitable for your business.