Email data is part of the corporate record and must be retained for set periods to meet legal and regulatory requirements. The easiest way for businesses to create a tamperproof repository for all email data is to use email retention software.
Email retention software plugs into your email system and allows policies to be set that dictate which emails are sent to the archive for long-term storage. You create your policies in the software and all emails that need to be retained will be sent to the archive. The software is a set and forget solution that allows you to automate the entire process of email retention and deletion of emails when the retention period is over.
Archiving Emails for Retention Purposes to Meet Compliance Requirements
The main purpose of email retention software is to store a read-only, tamper-proof copy of all emails that need to be retained to meet government, legal, and industry requirements and to securely store those emails for several years. In contrast to an email backup, emails stored in the archive are indexed, which mean the archive can be easily searched.
If emails are deleted from mailboxes and need to be recovered, a search can be performed and individual or groups of emails can be recovered and restored. Searching and recovering emails from the archive is a quick and easy process. End users can search their own email archives via their mail client, without having to involve the IT department. While a copy of a message can be restored to a mailbox, the original message cannot be deleted from the archive. Come what may, a permanent record of the original email will be retained until your pre-defined email retention period has elapsed.
On-Premise or Cloud-Based Email Retention Software?
Email retention software can be used to create an email archive that can be stored on-premise within your existing infrastructure or you can host the archive in the cloud. While many SMBs and enterprises may feel more comfortable storing their email data on-premise, the cloud offers many benefits and is usually the most cost-effective solution.
On-premise archives require the purchase of hardware, that hardware must be maintained, as must the hardware that stores the backup of your archive. You will no doubt need to upgrade your hardware periodically, especially as the email retention period for certain types of email data is 7 years or more. Storage space can therefore be an issue. The cost of hardware and the labor costs of maintenance, backups, and patching mean that over time, the cloud is usually the lower cost solution.
The cloud offers virtually unlimited scalability so you will never run out of storage space. Your cloud-based archive can be accessed from any device and from any location through a simple web-based interface via a standard web browser, or via a mail client add-on.
The easiest option for cloud-based archiving is to use an email archiving-as-a-service solution. With email archiving-as-a-service, your service provider will provide the email retention software which will be hosted in the cloud. The software will be maintained and updated by the service provider so the solution will not add to your patching burden. The service provider will ensure your archive is always available, that all email is stored securely, and your email archive will be constantly backed up. Service providers take all the complexity out of email archiving.
ArcTitan Cloud: a 100% Cloud-Based Email Retention Software Solution
ArcTitan Cloud is a powerful, 100% cloud-based email archiving solution for businesses, educational institutions, and managed service providers that makes email archiving for e-Discovery and regulatory compliance simple.
With ArcTitan Cloud you can securely archive all your organization’s email for long term storage and can retrieve emails instantly whenever you need them. ArcTitan Cloud is compatible with virtually all email services, it supports multiple exchange servers and stores, and you can import data easily from MS Exchange, Google Apps, EML, MBOX, MSG, or PST. There are no proprietary data formats so you can move your data to another system easily, and can export data to EML, MSG, PDF, TIFF and PST.
With ArcTitan Cloud you can send emails to your archive at a rate of around 200 emails a second and searches provide instant results. With ArcTitan, a search of 30 million emails takes less than a second. There is no limit on storage space, the solution is scalable to more than 60,000 users and, in contrast to many other email archiving solutions, you only pay for licensing for active users.
Setting up our email retention software solution typically takes around 15 minutes. You can then access the archive from any email client or via a web-based interface. Your archive will be 100% secure on Replicated Persistent Storage on AWS S3, backed up automatically, and you will be 100% protected against outages and data loss. The solution also meets all compliance requirements and industry standards, including GDPR, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA.
To find out more about ArcTitan, details of pricing, and to arrange a product demonstration, give the TitanHQ team a call today.