One thing you can rely on in business, is the ability for email inbox sizes to keep growing. Back in 2007 a 10GB mailbox was considered plenty, these days most customers use a 25GB mailbox, with our unlimited option growing in popularity.
Added to this growth is the ever-increasing importance of email for businesses. In the modern corporate environment, many business functions are handled via email, including sales orders, customer queries and internal decision-making.
This combination means it is essential for organisations to adopt a robust approach to email retention.
Why Archive?
| Compliance –In some industry sectors, long-term email retention is essential and external archiving keeps the business compliant, without using up mailbox resources. |
| Evidence – At times, companies may need to follow a chain of email messages, either to defend against a legal threat, or for internal investigations. Knowing all emails are archived and cannot be deleted by end-users, helps protect company interests. |
| Attachment storage – Attachments take up a large amount of mailbox space. Using an archive means users can delete attachments and still have complete access to them later if needed. |
Safe and Found
The simplest way of retaining emails is to simply keep them in the live mailbox. However this can cause several issues
| Mobile access — It’s common now for employees to use mobile devices for email. These devices operate with restricted memory and storage space and larger mailboxes will slow down access. Additionally, pulling more data across a network will mean higher data charges on mobile networks. |
| Slower access — Whilst improvements have been made, it will always take longer to search and sort through larger mailboxes. |
| Deletion — The deletion of emails, either accidental or deliberate, is a real issue. Once removed from the deleted items folder, a message may never be retrievable. |
Rather than keeping all messages in a live mailbox, and relying on employees to perform their own message management, it’s preferable to set-up an automatic email archiving service, such as our own UltraVault.
| Automatic archiving — End-users don’t need to change any of their email habits to start archiving, as everything is controlled via MX Records. |
| Attachment archiving — It isn’t just emails that are stored. UltraVault archiving also keep copies of all attachments, making it an easy way of retrieving documents. |
| Unlimited archiving — With UltraVault, there’s no limits on the size of your archive. No matter how many emails you send and receive, or how big attachments are, everything is kept safe. |
| Seperate storage — The archive isn’t counted against live mailbox space, so it doesn’t affect your mailbox quota. |
| Available everywhere — Accessed via a web browser, the archive is available even when you don’t have access to your email app, or mobile device. |
| Export archives — Individual messages can be retrieved fron the archive, and resent to the user’s inbox, or multiple messages can be exported in a standard MBOX or PST format. |
| Spam protection — Spam and virus filtering is built into the service, helping keep email accounts safe from malicious activities. |
Email is a vital tool for businesses, and organisations need to make sure old messages are available for instant retrieval in any circumstance. Relying on the end user to maintain a mailbox archive risks leaving the company open to non-compliance, or worse.
Our UltraVault service delivers safe, secure external email archiving. Giving organisations the peace-of-mind to get on with the daily business activities whilst knowing email activity is being safely logged and stored without end-users having to worry about it.
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