Implementing an email archive is important for compliance, eDiscovery, litigation support, storage management, and business continuity, but it is easy to make mistakes choosing and setting up an email archive. Here we provide some email archiving best practices to follow to help you get on the right track. If you follow these email archiving best practices you should be able to avoid legal headaches and ensure easy access to emails whenever you need them.
Why Email Archiving is Now Essential for Businesses
An email archive is a repository that protects against email data loss. Much of the information communicated via email is not stored elsewhere. If emails are accidentally or deliberately deleted and are required at a later date, they can be recovered from the archive. In contrast to an email backup, an email archive can be searched, and emails can be quickly and easily recovered. An email archive therefore serves as a black box flight recorder for email. It ensures that come what may, vital data is not lost.
There are many regulations that require email data to be retained for a set period of time, such as Sarbanes–Oxley, HIPAA, and FERPA in the United States, and GoBD in Germany. An email archive helps businesses comply with these regulations and other laws such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Compliance with these regulations can be a challenge if emails are only stored in backups or PST files. When emails need to be found, hours can be wasted searching for individual emails if an email archive is not used. With an email archive, emails can be found and recovered in seconds. An email archive can also ease the strain on your mail servers. It is not uncommon for businesses to reduce the load on Exchange servers by more than 80% with an email archive and save up to 75% in storage space.
Email Archiving Best Practices to Adopt
We have listed some important email archiving best practices to follow to make sure you choose the best email archiving option, you avoid legal and staff issues, and your email archiving journey goes smoothly.
Understand your Goals and Objectives
You will no doubt be looking to implement an email archiving solution for several reasons. Commonly, an email archiving solution is set up for compliance reasons. You may have been selected for a compliance audit or have recently had a nightmare finding email data for eDiscovery. Whatever your reasons, thoroughly assess all goals and objectives and select a solution that will solve all your issues in the quickest and simplest way.
Choose a Solution that will Grow with your Business
Your archiving requirements are likely to change and the amount of emails you will need to archive is likely to increase considerably over time. Make sure you factor in growth when choosing an archiving solution to avoid headaches down the line. Cloud-based email archives will give you the most flexibility due to the scalability of the cloud. With ArcTitan, you can archive all sent and received emails, there is no limit on storage space, and no limit on the number of users. You just pay for the number of active users. As your business grows, ArcTitan grows with you.
Choose a Solution that Gives You Maximum Flexibility
Many email archiving solutions will provide you with the functions you need but are not particularly flexible if your situation changes. Importing legacy email data can also be complex, requiring costly and time-consuming data conversions. You can also be tied into proprietary data formats which make exporting data difficult to make it more difficult to change providers. ArcTitan allows data imports from MS Exchange, Google Apps, EML, MBOX, MSG, or PST. You can export to ML, MSG, PDF, TIFF and PST, and you are not tied into proprietary data formats. If you decide to leave, TitanHQ does not make it difficult for you.
Seek Legal Advice on Data Retention Requirements
You are likely to have to archive and retain data to comply with several data retention laws and timescales. Even laws such as HIPAA have different data retention time periods for different types of data. Complying with federal, state, and industry regulations can be complex. Seek legal advice to make sure your policies are compliant with current regulations and review and revise your data retention policies at least annually to ensure you remain compliant.
Document your Archiving Policies and Procedures
When you have decided on your data retention policies, procedures and time periods, make sure everything is documented. Your policy documents will need to be produced in the event of an audit. Make sure all employees are trained on use of the email archiving system and are fully aware of your email archiving policies.
Choose an Email Archiving Solution with a High Degree of Automation
Email archiving can be a drain on productivity if the process is not automated. If you rely on employees deciding which emails they should archive and which should be deleted, mistakes are likely to be made. Choose an email archiving solution that automates archiving as much as possible. With ArcTitan, all sent and received emails are archived in real time. You can easily set retention policies based on different types of emails and automate the whole process to increase employee productivity and avoid costly archiving mistakes.
ArcTitan Cloud – An Effortless SaaS Email Archiving Solution from TitanHQ
ArcTitan Cloud is a secure, cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) email archiving solution that is ideally suited for SMBs and Managed Service Providers serving the SMB market. ArcTitan Cloud is a secure, tamper-proof email archive that is compliant with GDPR, eDiscovery, Sarbanes–Oxley, HIPAA and other email data retention, audit, and e-discovery requirements.
ArcTitan Cloud takes the complexity out of email archiving. The solution is exceptionally easy to implement into your email infrastructure, it works with all operating systems, mail servers, and email services, and it is simple to administer. You can administer your entire email archive directly through Outlook or via an intuitive web-based interface on desktop and mobile.
ArcTitan Cloud offers lightning fast archiving with a load performance of 200 emails a second. Emails are archived and indexed in real time and you can search 30 million emails a second. ArcTitan Cloud acts as a black box flight recorder that ensures you never lose an email.
Being born in the cloud, ArcTitan is highly scalable with no limits on the number of users or storage space. In contrast to many mail service archiving solutions, you can easily archive legacy emails and can import and export data in a wide range of formats. All email data sent to and from the archive is protected by end to end encryption, and the archive is stored in a data center certified to the IL5 standard.
ArcTitan Cloud has been developed to meet the needs of Managed Service Providers. The solution can be supplied as a white label ready for branding for MSPs looking to start offering a hosted email archiving service to their service stacks. TitanHQ offers generous margins for MSPs and the solution allows them to easily generate regular recurring monthly revenue from their clients with minimal effort.
To find out more about ArcTitan Cloud and how it can benefit your business, contact TitanHQ today to arrange a free product demonstration..
