The New Deal: Proactive Email Archiving

It used to be that email archiving was relegated to just financial services companies which were required to archive their email due to regulatory compliance requirements.

But, increasingly, companies of all stripes are discovering its other advantages.

As our inboxes get clogged and our email servers bloat, many organizations are turning to archiving to ‘prune' their on-premise email stores and regain their system's performance. Email archiving solutions solve these storage management headaches by offloading email storage to the cloud or to an on-premise solution.

But, increased email volumes have also resulted in the courts shining a brighter spotlight on email communications. The growing cost of e-discovery, compounded by new regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), has changed the way businesses must deal with email. When email becomes evidence, the ability to quickly search all historical email provides a competitive advantage.

In a recent article on SearchStorage.com ("Email archiving needs soar as e-discovery requests rise"), organizations are deploying email archiving solutions just to be proactive. Miami Country Day School, for instance, has no pending lawsuits and no pressing need for e-discovery capabilities. "But, Donna Lenaghan, the private school's director of technology, said she wanted to be proactive as soon as she learned of the legal requirements through an education technology journal."

Miami Country Day School still hasn't had occasion to use e-discovery capabilities for legal discovery, but they are still getting value out of the archive by providing end users access to their own personal archives. Now, their end users have the tools at their finger tips for locating and restoring inadvertently deleted emails. In the past, ferreting them from backup disks might have taken a day or more.

"It's a very handy day-to-day operation tool," said Lenaghan. "But it's also a peace-of-mind insurance policy if you have a legal issue."

And for organizations who go the hosted email archiving route (vs. opting for an on-premise solution), they can get up and running in hours - not weeks or months. In fact, Lenaghan didn't even consider an in-house email archiving product, because the school's four-person IT staff already has a full plate, with 1,000 students and staff members.

For many resource-strapped IT departments, like Miami Country Day School, the incremental benefits of getting relief from spiraling email storage costs, being able to quickly respond to e-discovery requests, and allowing end-users to restore lost or deleted emails is the icing on the cake. And it's this "icing" that is increasingly putting email archiving at the top of their priority lists.