As email has become an accepted form of business communication, archiving email messages has become more important for organizations than ever. For paperless workplaces, email is the only way to communicate memos, new company rules and any other type of inter-department correspondence. As such, important information is transmitted through the medium. It's only logical to keep all messages archived for record-keeping purposes.
Function
Archiving email works to extract messages, their content and the attachments that come with them from a company's incoming and outgoing mail servers. The archiving application indexes these messages and stores them in a read-only database to ensure that they are kept in their original state. The good thing about email archiving is that it helps reduce the load on email servers. It frees up a considerable amount of storage in these servers so new email can come in and out more efficiently. In archiving solutions, emails are stored in compressed format and this helps save a lot of disk space.
Email Compliance
Because of the widespread use of email, messages from this form of communication can now be considered binding evidence in court, provided that they are presented in their original state. Archiving email is now being implemented as a requirement for businesses and organizations in order to aid in e-discovery. When e-mails are not archived, it would take a lot of time and money for the legal enforcer to conduct a search of all the backed-up messages. Companies that fail to submit the required records and those that do submit records that are not in their original forms are going to pay a huge fine for 'spoilage' of evidence. Non-compliance to the archiving legislations can result in prison sentences and fines as well.
In-house vs hosted
There are two types of archiving email solutions. The first one entails a set up where the email archival is hosted -? that is, an application on the company's email server works to transport email messages to a third party data base outside the company's network for archiving. You can access the archived mail using a web browser or an email client. These services are generally cheaper but retrieval is limited within a given time frame making it hard to comply with state and federal regulations.
On the other hand, there are in-house archiving solutions where the repository of archived mail is still located within the company's servers. This option offers more confidentiality and data control. If you look in the right places, you can even get a service that wouldn't cost you a lot.
Tango introduces the DataCove. This network appliance offers a simple and cost-effective email archiving solution that will suit all types of businesses and organizations.
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