Email Archiving & Continuity

It is well accepted today that the Cloud Computing Paradigm enables Businesses (large and small) to access Generic, Shared IT Infrastructure over the Internet instead of implementing that Infrastructure on-premises themselves.

It, therefore, allows Businesses to solve real technology problems without upfront Capital expense and at a lower Operational cost.  Today we look at Email Archiving & Continuity – think of the Archive as a Registry for Email. Most companies are familiar with the concept of a Document Registry. This is the same concept but for email.

The Business Problem

Over 60% of all ‘Corporate Knowledge’ is in the form of email. Email therefore is a corporate asset and you require clear and defined policies as to how it should be managed within the organization.

The problems facing many small and mid-sized businesses today are:

1. Storage of the large volumes of email being continuously sent and received (including attachments).
2. Poorly defined Management & Retention Policies for corporate email
3. Inability to recover lost or deleted email
4. Performing a Legal or Operational discovery is costly and labour intensive – this is the process of searching for (and finding) important email, on a specific topic, that may have been sent or received a long time ago (possibly by someone who no longer works for the company). This may be for the purposes of litigation, customer support, etc.
5. Local Archives used by email clients such as Outlook can get corrupted or lost should local machine crash.
6. Retaining the ability to be able to send and receive email during a period where the corporate email server is down (due to system crash, emergency maintenance, or other disasters). This is known as Messaging Continuing which is a Disaster Recovery function.The Cloud-based Solution: Online Data Backup & Restore Service

What organizations require is Info Exchange’s Electronic Registry or Email Archive, where every email sent or received is automatically saved in a tamperproof (read-only) Vault in the Cloud. Users can restore deleted email from the registry back into their Inboxes.
We can even ingest all legacy email that every user has received in the past (stored in local archives) into the system so as to eliminate the need for local archives which can get corrupted.
All, or Selected Users can have an associated DR or Continuity Mailbox which allows them to send and receive email as normal using a web interface after a Disaster has been declared.

Benefits

• No upfront capital for archiving infrastructure
• Unlimited Storage in the Cloud with Unlimited Retention periods.
• More Storage available on the local Network – No longer need to store the email on the local network as it is already stored in the Registry Archive. This frees up storage space on the company’s network and reduces load on the Company’s email server.
• Email Continuity – Users can continue to send and receive email even when their primary mail server is down.
• Management of the corporate asset is automated and policy driven rather than by some action (or inaction) by the end-user.