Most frequently, an email archiving appliance is a Software-as-a-Service cloud-based application for archiving emails. Cloud-based email archiving appliances have the advantages of quick access, fast searches, and easy retrieval. More importantly, they tend to be more secure and compliant than on-premises hardware appliances.
When evaluating email archiving appliances, it is important to be aware that some lack the capabilities to be compliant with federal, state, and industry retention and audit regulations, while others can cause productivity issues if they require the services of an IT department to retrieve emails that may have been misfiled or deleted by accident. There is also the choice of deployment options to consider.
A hardware email archiving appliance has limitations inasmuch as, when a user wants to search for or retrieve data, the correct removable storage unit has to be located and data restored to a server. Furthermore, removable storage units can be lost, damaged, or stolen, and there are limits on how much data each can store – a problem shared with on-premises email archiving appliances.
By comparison, a cloud-based email archiving appliance maintains data in the cloud and allows data to be searched for and retrieved with the click of a mouse. Data stored in secure cloud-based data centers will not get lost, damaged, or stolen. The archive is encrypted and protected by multiple safeguards to protect against unauthorized data access or data loss, and the archive is backed up automatically. You will also never run out of storage space in the cloud. Storage capacity grows dynamically to cope with increased volumes of data over time.
Compliance with Email Archiving Regulations
Compliance with email archiving regulations is much more straightforward with a cloud-based email archiving appliance – provided emails are copied in real time and not periodically, as the periodic archiving of emails allows for emails to be altered or deleted before archiving occurs. Real-time copying is essential for compliance with legislation such as the Federal Rules of Civil Disclosure.
Other compliance issues to be aware of include access controls. An email archiving appliance should be capable of restricting access to only delegated personnel and produce tamper-evident audit logs to identify when unauthorized access has been attempted and if emails have been altered in any way. The failure to have appropriate access controls would make an email archiving appliance non-compliant with Acts such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley.
Archiving and the General Data Protection Regulation
The “wrong” type of email archiving appliance could also create compliance issues with the EU´s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Under GDPR, businesses that collect, process, or store EU citizens´ Personally Identifiable Information must have mechanisms in place to encrypt data in transit and at rest as well as the aforementioned real-time copying of data and access controls.
EU citizens also have the rights to request access to any information collected about them, and correct it if errors exists. Furthermore, businesses have to be capable of permanently deleting personal data within thirty days (if requested), or once the reason for it having been collected, processed, or stored has expired. Failure to comply with GDPR can result in a significant financial penalty.
Archiving to Optimize Performance and Enhance Productivity
How an email archiving appliance copies and archives data can influence performance and productivity. Whereas some email archiving appliances copy and archive an email in its entirety, others remove duplicated content before compressing the data and indexing it – the latter process resulting in less data to search through – and fewer duplicated results – when looking to retrieve an email. To further speed up searches, different elements of emails are indexed separately. With some solutions, such as ArcTitan, the message header, sender/receiver, subject, message body, and attachments are indexed separately and distributed among cloud indexes separately, which makes for much more efficient and faster searches.
In regards to enhancing productivity, an email archiving appliance that de-duplicates and compresses an email before archiving it reduces search and retrieval times and – when employees are allowed to search for their own misfiled, lost or accidentally deleted emails – can reduce the burden on IT departments. In this regard, the interface of a email archiving appliance that is used for searching for archiving emails should be intuitive and easy to use so valuable time is not wasted performing searches and accessing emails.
Mitigating the Risk of Data Loss Caused by Insiders
Data loss caused by insiders – the malicious deletion of business-critical emails – has grown to be a big problem for many businesses. A report published in 2016 by Osterman Research claimed that 69% of businesses had been victims of data loss due to employees maliciously deleting or tampering with emails prior to leaving employment.
A cloud-based email archiving appliance with real-time archiving capabilities can mitigate the risk of data theft from inside the business in two ways. The first is by reducing the amount of access a departing employee has to archived emails, and the second – should a data loss occur – is by enabling the business to restored maliciously deleted or tampered with emails quickly and effectively.
ArcTitan – Compliant, Effective, and Secure Email Archiving in the Cloud
ArcTitan is an industry-leading cloud-based email archiving appliance from WebTitan that has all the capabilities required for businesses to comply with federal, state and industry email archiving regulations. ArcTitan helps to improve the performance of mail servers by reducing the volume of stored messages, enhances productivity by helping to eliminate wasted time, and mitigates the risk of data loss caused by insiders. Easy to deploy and administer, ArcTitan ensures your business will never again lose an email.
Being cloud-based, ArcTitan works on all operating systems and with all leading email services and clients. It is capable of de-duplicating, compressing, and indexing up to 200 emails per second, and sends them to a secure archive in an IL5 certified data center via an encrypted TLS protocol. Should your business need to find and retrieve an email, ArcTitan can search a database of 30 million emails in less than a second.
Email data is stored securely in the cloud on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3, and the archive is automatically backed up. Since ArcTitan is provided as SaaS, there is no need to perform any updates to the solution, virtually everything is managed for you.
If you would like to see ArcTitan in action, do not hesitate to contact us and request a demonstration. This will give the opportunity to witness how easy it is to deploy, configure, and use our email archiving appliance and ask any questions about compliant, effective, and secure email archiving in the cloud. To find out more about ArcTitan, contact our team of Sales Technicians today.
