You've made the decision to use an email archiving solution for your company. Great! You've made a decision that can potentially save you thousands of dollars.

But now comes the hard part. How do you pick the best email archiving solution for your company?

Not all email archiving solutions are equal. Some offer a wide range of features. Others are more affordable.

When choosing an email archiving solution, there are features to be on the look out for.

Keep reading to learn about email archiving solutions and 8 must have features.

What is Email Archiving?

On the surface, email archiving is as simple as it sounds: a system for storing email messages in a safe and searchable manner. However, despite email archiving solutions having a near 20-year history in the market, they can be complex, expensive, and difficult to use at scale.

Why is email archiving needed?

Email communication continues to be a widely used. It is predicted that by the end of 2019, the number of worldwide email users will increase to over 2.9 billion.

Odds are that your company uses email for internal and external communications. It's also likely that you have thousands of emails housed on your mail server.

Having too many emails on an email server can be problematic. Email service can become extremely or unavailable entirely. To avoid mail server overload, it's best to archive old emails.

So why can't employees just delete old emails?

Archiving emails offers many benefits, including:

• Knowledge management
• Storage management
• Compliance/auditing needs
• Disaster recovery
• Mail server performance
• Litigation/legal holds

Who is responsible for evaluating email archiving solutions?

Many businesses don't use email archival until their mail servers are reaching capacity, or until they have experienced devastating results from litigation where email contained a smoking gun. Don't be that business owner!

Now is the time to tackle email archiving efforts.

Your in-house messaging admins can set up an email archiving system. But, it's best to outsource this work. Outsourcing allows your admins to focus on other IT needs.

Ready to find the best email archiving solution for your company?

Keep reading for what to look for in a solution.

8 Must Haves in Email Archiving Solutions

The purpose of email archiving is so that your company can maintain access to emails for legal and business purposes. Without a proper solution, odds are your company is spending too much time archiving emails.

Before you spend money on an email archiving solution, be sure you are selecting one that fits your business' needs.

Here are 8 must-have features when considering email archiving solutions.

1. Compatibility

In the ideal world, your email provider can act as your email archiving solution provider. If this is not possible, be sure that the company you choose is compatible with your email client.

The email archival provider you choose should support a variety of email archiving scenarios, including:

• Microsoft Exchange Server on-premises
• Microsoft Office 365
• SMTP Journaling
• Policy-based mailbox capture
• Deep processing of .PST files

If a solution is not compatible with all of your email capture scenarios, you're going to have problems!

2. Ability to ingest past emails

The email archiving solution should be able to ingest emails that existed before the solution is put in place. What good is an archive of emails that don't include all business communications?

Ensure that the provider is able to ingest PST files or an existing mail store. Without this capability, you risk data loss.

3. An effective and efficient archiving process

There are several ways to archive emails.

One solution may only archive emails received from outside of the company network. Another solution may archive every incoming and outgoing email, no matter where they originate.

It's important to understand your company's archiving system needs.

How robust and in-depth should the archival be? Do you want to keep all email attachments as well?

If your company is focused on compliance, complete archival is a must. Ensure that the solution you choose fits your archiving needs.

4. Data redundancy

Data redundancy is a must-have. Ensure that your data is spread across a variety of data centers. The more data center usage, the better.

If a data center is impacted because of a natural disaster, you still need access to your archived emails.

The provider you choose should offer high redundancy levels. Without proper redundancy, your company's data is at risk.

5. Compliance with government mandates

The email archiving solution you choose must be compliant with government mandates. Policies such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley should be followed.

If a provider is not compliant, you risk future legal issues. Your data is only as reliable as the system that stores it.

Don't put company data at risk with improper email archiving.

6. Easy search and retrieval

Don't assume that your IT team will be the only ones to access the email archives. Relying on your IT team for retrieving an email from an archive will bog down the workload. You want your IT team to focus on more pressing issues!

The email archiving solution you choose should be simple. Ensure an everyday non-IT user can understand the solution.

Anyone with access to the repository should be able to search and retrieve an email.

7. Fast searches

Along with easy searching and retrieving, the process should also be fast.

You will likely have thousands, potentially millions of emails, in the archive repository. Some companies reach into the billions of messages. This means that the search capability needs to be quick at scale.

A quality email archiving solution should be able to sift through an archive quickly. Traditional email archiving solutions take hours and days to provide search results at scale. A next-gen cloud-based archive can provide Google-like search results, even when the result set contains millions of hits. The search and retrieval process shouldn't take any longer than a few seconds.

If you're waiting minutes for a search to complete, you've got the wrong solution!

8. Quick ingest speeds

You don't want to select a solution that will takes months to implement. The sooner you can use an email archiving solution, the better.

Before committing to a solution, be aware of the provider's data ingest speed. The quicker a company can archive emails, the better.

Company's with a robust architecture can complete ingests quickly. Don't settle for a company that draws out the email archiving process.

Store Your Business Data Wisely

Looking for an email archiving solution? Want to implement cloud storage for your company's data? If so, HubStor is the company to hire.

We are data storage experts! We know the importance of a smart storage strategy.

Stop paying high storage costs. Don't suffer with old school archiving systems any longer!

Contact us today to store your company's data more efficiently.