Aug 31, 2020 | Email Archiving
Many businesses have created an email archive for compliance purposes and to ensure emails, documents, calendars, and other data in the email system is preserved to meet regulatory obligations and for disaster recovery.
Many businesses only discover after they have been using an email archive that it does not quite live up to expectations, is proving to be expensive, or the archive is no longer performing as well as it should.
Once you have set up an email archive, it does not mean that you are tied to any provider. Migrating your email archive to another provider that offers a service that is more suited to your organization requires a little planning, but it can be a pain free process.
Is it Time to Upgrade your Email Archive?
One of the main reasons for changing an email archive is because legacy archives have become sluggish due to the volume of backed up data. Over time, these legacy archives can become unreliable, searches do not always provide all the results, and in some cases the archiving solution reaches end of life and patches are no longer issued so security becomes an issue.
Storage space can become a problem if you are using aging email archiving appliances or physical servers, and latency can increase, especially if you have transitioned to cloud-based applications such as Office 365. If an email archive is failing to perform, it is time to upgrade to a new archiving solution; one that is more modern, can be searched much more rapidly, and does not pose a security risk to your organization.
Cloud Email Archives Can Solve Your Archiving Problems
With an increasing number of organizations having migrated to Office 365, using a cloud-based email archiving service makes a great deal of sense. Your email data is already in the cloud, so switching to a cloud-based email archive is a logical step. Moving data from the cloud to on-premises infrastructure is likely to involve some degree of latency, whereas archiving from a cloud service to another will avoid these latency problems and see improvements in performance.
You will not need maintain on-premises hardware with a cloud-based archive. The email archiving service provider is responsible for maintaining the hardware, patching, and performing updates. Cloud-based email archives also have scalability. As your email volume grows, your archive automatically scales, and more storage space is made available. You will never run out of storage space with a cloud email archiving service. Your cloud email service provider will just arrange for more servers to be made available.
Cloud email archives can also be accessed from any location, on any device, through either an email client or web browser – something that has become much more important during the COVID-19 pandemic, with many employees now working from home.
Making the change to a new email archiving service provider will likely greatly improve performance and allow faster archiving and searching. That means considerable productivity gains and less headaches for your IT department as the maintenance burden will be eased.
Companies that switch from legacy email archives to cloud archiving services can greatly reduce the cost of email archiving, allowing them to put their resources to much better use. Even switching from one cloud email archiving solution to another can see considerable costs saved.
ArcTitan: Save Costs and Improve the Performance of Your Archive
Regardless of the current email archiving solution you are using, migrating your email archive to ArcTitan is a straightforward and quick process. TitanHQ will guide you through the migration process, providing detailed steps to take to get your archive migrated quickly. Alternatively, we can talk you through the process and even work with your current provider directly to transfer your archive.
If you are upgrading from a legacy email solution to Office 365, you can simply transfer your archived data to ArcTitan, rather than send it to Office 365. Again, full assistance will be provided by our knowledgeable engineers.
Many ArcTitan customers have managed to reduce the load on their mail servers by 80%, significantly improving performance. Maintenance time can be slashed by around 50%, and the cost savings are considerable.
Then there is the speed of the solution. ArcTitan conducts searches at a rate of 30 million emails a second, searches can be combined, multiple searches run at once, and emails and attachments searched in the same search. Searches can also be saved if you conduct them frequently.
Security is assured with email data protected by end-to-end encryption, with passwords hashed and encrypted. Your archive is encrypted and stored securely on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3 and will be automatically backed up. Updates are managed for you and there will never be any patches to apply.
On top of all the features of ArcTitan, many of which are lacking in other email archiving solutions, you are also likely to be pleasantly surprised at the price of the solution (and the margin if you are an MSP looking to add email archiving to your service stack.)
For more information about ArcTitan and migrating your archive, give the TitanHQ team a call today and take the first step toward eliminating your email archiving headaches.
What our Customers Say…
“Fast, scalable, very easy to operate and has all the email archiving features a company needs to have. Safe and the cost was fantastic. A truly superb email archiving tool,” Jesse Gusmao, IT Manager.
Sociedade Hospital Samaritano. Brazil.
“I can tell you our experience has been outstanding. ArcTitan email archive has been the most effective solution we’ve found. Initially, we tested it for ourselves, but given the success we’ve had, we’re now signed up as a reseller and are confidently introducing the product to our small and medium clients.” Lou Liberio, IT Director. Clarion Data Systems, USA
“Exceptionally easy to install and insert into our email infrastructure. The effect and affect of ArcTitan Email Archiving was dramatic. The load on our Exchange server was reduced by 80% immediately.” Mike Pluta, IT Director. NRC Broadcasting, USA
Aug 27, 2020 | Email Archiving
Several thousand email messages can be received by a business every day, and many of those messages contain important documents and sensitive information, which in some cases is saved nowhere else other than the email system or on a user’s local device.
Several regulations require email data to be backed up and stored for a certain time period, with many businesses choosing to store copies of business emails using backups. While backups will allow a business to comply with regulations and ensure messages can be recovered in the event of disaster, backups are not searchable which makes recovery of emails a time-consuming process.
An email archive is a much better solution. Email archives store emails in a tamper-proof repository and, in contrast to backups, prior to being sent for long term storage, emails and attachments are indexed to allow them to be searched on demand. When an email needs to be found, a search can be performed and individual emails can be found and recovered in seconds or minutes, whereas the process of finding and recovering emails from a backup could take days.
In the event of a legal investigation, it is essential for emails to be produced. Businesses must be able to prove the integrity of email data and show an original copy of the messages is provided that has not been altered since being sent or received. If you cannot prove the integrity of email messages, you could get in serious legal trouble. In the event of a cyber-incident, email messages are checked in the investigation process, so it is also essential to maintain message integrity and ensure all emails can quickly be recovered.
Given the number of emails received by businesses every day, the amount of storage space that must be devoted to emails and attachments grows quickly. Businesses are likely to require terabytes of storage space, which can prove costly. A cloud-based archive ensures that there is always sufficient storage space available and rules can be sent to delete emails and attachments securely when they are no longer required to be retained by law. A cloud-based archive can reduce storage use by up to 75% compared to on premise storage and reduce maintenance time by up to 50%, resulting in significant cost savings.
Many businesses use Outlook for email, which stores emails in Personal Storage (PST) files. These files are stored locally on each user’s device and are not tamper-proof. They can also become corrupted, can be targeted in cyberattacks, and are at risk of being accidentally deleted. If these files are not backed up, in the event of data corruption or accidental deletion, they cannot be recovered. Using an email archive ensures that all users’ email data can be recovered, and users’ PST files can be quickly and easily restored. Without an email archive, critical business emails could easily be lost.
If you are required to comply with the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation, you must be able to search for data in email if a request is made by an E.U. citizen to access their data or if they exercise their ‘right to be forgotten.’ If you have an email archive, searches can be performed quickly, and it is easy to satisfy these GDPR requests. The failure to respond to these requests quickly, could easily result in a substantial fine for noncompliance.
Should you ever need to change email systems and migrate to new email servers, all inboxes, messages, and attachments will need to be migrated to the new server. If you do not have the right systems in place, that process can be difficult and time-consuming. Using an email archive makes the process faster and simpler, ensuring seamless migrations with few errors, saving considerable time and effort.
In summary, and email archive will…
- Ensure a tamper-proof copy of email data is retained and is always accessible
- Allow you to search millions of emails in seconds
- Reduce server management costs
- eDiscovery requests can be processed quickly
- Email data is protected against cyberattacks and can always be recovered in the event of a data destruction event
- Email migrations can be performed quickly and easily without data corruption
- Reduce storage space by 50% or more and greatly reduce costs
- Maintain an audit trail to ensure compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), PCI-DSS, SEC, DPA, HIPAA, and GDPR
- Free up IT support time by allowing employees to access their own email archives
- Help with compliance and ensures data can be quickly found and produced in the event of an investigation
ArcTitan: Email Archiving Made Simple
ArcTitan is a powerful email archiving solution from TitanHQ that makes archiving email, performing searches, and recovering email data a quick and simple process.
Key Features of ArcTitan
- Scalable, email archiving that grows with your business
- Email data stored securely in the cloud on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3
- Lightning fast searches – Search 30 million emails a second
- Rapid archiving at up to 200 emails a second
- Automatic backups of the archive
- Email archiving with no impact on network performance
- Ensure an exact, tamper-proof copy of all emails is retained
- Easy data retrieval for eDiscovery
- Protection for email from cyberattacks
- Eliminate PSTs and other security risks
- Facilitates policy-based access rights and role-based access
- Only pay for active users
- Slashes the time and cost of eDiscovery other formal searches
- Migration tools to ensure the integrity of data during transfer
- Seamless integration with Outlook
- Supports single sign-on
- Save and combine searches
- Perform multiple searches simultaneously
- Limits IT department involvement in finding lost email – users can access their own archived email
- Compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, etc.
If you are not yet archiving your email, are unhappy with your current provider, or are an MSP that is not yet offering email archiving to your clients or is unhappy with the service or margins with your current provider, give the TitanHQ team a call to find out more about ArcTitan.
Aug 26, 2020 | Internet Security
The COVID-19 pandemic created a massive opportunity for cybercriminals, and they have been exploiting it with vigor, especially in phishing campaigns. Phishing is the use of deception to trick someone into performing an action. Social engineering techniques are used to get people to open malicious email attachments, visit hyperlinks to websites where sensitive information is harvested, or to take other actions such as make donations to fake charities.
In the early stages of the pandemic when little was known about the virus, how it was spread, the risk of infection, and the disease it caused, the public was very much in the dark and craved information. This created the perfect opportunity for cybercriminals for use in phishing and other cyberattacks.
Recently, the United Nations released data collected about phishing attacks involving COVID-19 related themes showing there had been a 350% increase in new phishing websites in the first quarter of the year, many of which were health-related and targeted health systems and hospitals.
Research conducted by Check Point also found a major rise in domain registrations linked to COVID-19. Research showed that phishing attacks increased from around 5,000 a week in February to more than 200,000 per week by late April, many of which were linked to COVID-19.
Early in the year the lack of knowledge about COVID-19 and the SARS-CoV-2 virus suited large-scale phishing campaigns involving millions of messages, with cybercriminals re-purposing their normal campaigns and started using COVID-19 themed websites and lures. Phishing emails offered information about the virus, possible cures, and advice to avoid being infected. When there was a shortage of personal protective equipment, phishing lures were used offering low cost supplies and testing kits.
Now that there is more information about the virus and cases and PPE shortages have largely been addressed, phishing scams related to COVID-19 have evolved. A study conducted by ProPrivacy showed that far from the COVID-19 related phishing attacks disappearing and cybercriminals returning to their old campaigns using fake invoices and alike, these campaigns are still running, but they have become more targeted and sophisticated.
These targeted campaigns offer answers to new questions being raised by the public, such as whether it is safe for children to return to schools. The study, conducted in partnership with VirusTotal and WHOIS XML, identified 1,200 COVID-related domains were still being registered each day and a sample of 600,000 of those domains revealed around 125,000 of them were malicious and were mostly being used for phishing.
We can expect to see another wave of phishing emails and websites set up related to COVID-19 vaccines when they start to come to market. Since the threat has not gone away and is likely to remain for some time to come, it is important to remain on your guard and to be cautious with any emails received, especially those related to COVIID-19.
Businesses also need to take extra care to ensure that their employees and devices are protected. Most businesses will already have a spam filtering solution in place to block phishing emails, but now is a good time to review those controls. If spam and phishing emails are still reaching inboxes, consider an alternative solution or a third-party spam filter if you are using Office 365 and are relying on Exchange Online Protection for spam and phishing protection.
One anti-phishing measure that is less commonly used by businesses is a web filter. A web filter allows businesses to control the websites and webpages that their employees can visit. Web filters, such as WebTitan, block access to websites known to be malicious, such as those known to be used for phishing. Web filters also categorize websites and allow certain categories to be blocked. By carefully controlling the web content that can be accessed by employees, businesses will be much better protected against phishing attacks and other cyber attacks with a web-based component.
It is also strongly recommended to implement 2-factor authentication, which will provide protection in the event of credentials being compromised in a phishing attack.
If you would like more information about web filtering, WebTitan, or improving your spam filter, give the TitanHQ team a call.
