Has your email archive strategy evolved to take advantage of the latest cloud developments?

Email has become one of the most used yet least thought about tools in the business world today. A typical work day might see a hundred of emails flit back and forth between adjacent cubicles, let alone the many thousand that travel in and out of the office.

And while many see email as little more than a communication system, it is an integral component of any business.

In fact, according to Osterman Research, 75 percent of a company's intellectual property is housed within its email and messaging systems.

Utilizing an email archive is very different than just having them backed up.

A backup keeps the emails in a static environment. An archive, however, gives you the ability to search, sort, filter and analyze every email you have in your system.

This makes scouring through the thousands you might have saved easier. Given that email is a common target in litigation and investigations, email archiving is as important as ever.

As you can see, investing in an email archive is vital to the success and sustainability of your company. Modern, cloud-based email archiving offers better scalable, Google-like search speeds, and lower cost than traditional email archiving approaches. If you're still not convinced, here are 10 reasons why you should consider an upgrade.

1) Safeguard your Intellectual Property

Your email system contains a lot of your company's valuable intellectual property.

For example, if an employee is working on a new product and emailing prototype ideas to coworkers you don't want that information lost to your business forever if those emails are deleted or if the employee leaves the company.

With a well-run email archive, you will never have to worry about valuable information slipping through the cracks again. Modern email archiving has built-in data classification that can help you to identify private and sensitive data, tag it, and lock it down.

2) Data Management

The simplest reason to invest in an email archive is to save space. Internal server space can be a precious thing and you don't want to waste valuable space with what can be hundreds of thousands of emails.

If a company with over 1,000 employees gives each of them a one-gigabyte mailbox, that company is already looking at one terabyte of data committed just to storing emails.

Imagine how much good that space could do if used on something else.

The data management problem for email does not go away with Office 365. It is likely that requirements will emerge for external archiving. Already we see companies wanting an external backup, and some companies archive externally to minimize active email sitting in serial litigant user's mailboxes.

With data-aware cloud storage, you can effectively manage the number of emails you have saved on your server without the fear that whatever you delete will be gone forever. Plus, defensible deletion, and event-based WORM retention help you have confidence that you are not over-preserving emails.

3) Knowledge Center

Your email archive is an effective source of information for your company -- a sort of browser history if you will.

For example, say you want to find out the many different ways an employee responded to an issue a client was having in order to assess which method proved the most successful.

Through your archive, you can research this and many other queries you might have that can help improve the way you operate.

4) Legal Cover

When it comes to litigation, it's better to be safe than sorry. If your company ever faces a legal claim or audit, it would be wise to have a detailed record of every email saved and readily available. Businesses involved in federal court cases are required to identify, conserve and collect all electronically stored information. 

Using software like HubStor's Compliance Journal Archive service, you can maintain a highly scalable and searchable journal archive, and find and place all relevant emails on litigation hold, which will save you a ton of time in the long run.

5) Safety in the Cloud

From something as large scale as a system shutdown to something as simple as forgetting your laptop at home, having your email archive stored remotely ensures that the long-term damage will remain minimal.

With your email archive stored safely in the cloud, you can rest easy knowing that no matter what happens you won't be starting over from square one. Your modern, cloud-based email archive can serve as a business continuity feature, giving your users an alternate method of accessing their email when all other systems fail.

6) Email Archive Analytics

Being able to view large sets of data from a bird's eye view can be extremely beneficial.

Understanding the social interactions between your employees and monitoring how they communicate with clients can give you a better understanding of what works and what doesn't.

Using archive analytics can help you see your company in the big picture by analyzing its smallest interactions. Cloud-based email archiving can leverage other services in the cloud for content analysis much more easily than you could ever hope to achieve on-premises.

7)  Easy Audits

An email archiving solution allows you to easily monitor how employees are using their emails.

Depending on the nature of your business, a lot of very sensitive information is being communicated through email. It's important that this information is regulated properly and the best way to make sure the right procedures are being followed is with an email audit.

This is also a useful tool when it comes to investigating claims of harassment or misconduct in the workplace. By searching for certain keywords in email exchanges between employees you can determine the validity of each claim. Cloud-based email archiving is smart about custodian mapping. Multiple SMTP addresses (aliases and domain names) map back to a common principal in your directory. Thus, doing a user search gives you the complete picture.

8) Saves Money

Either through the time it will save you searching or space it will save you on your server, a next-generation email archive in the cloud will help you cut costs significantly.

Some archiving services will offer elastic scalability, meaning you won't have to pay for extra storage or services you don't need until you need them.

9) IT Will Thank You

Anyone who works in a company with a heavy reliance on their IT department knows that a happy IT department means a happy workplace. And an unhappy and overworked IT department means well...just trust me you don't want that.

With a cloud email archiving system, IT will not have to waste any time searching the server or the deleted items retention bin for that one email you misplaced.

If you give access to the archive to your employees, IT won't be bothered. Which makes for a very happy IT department and its smiles all around.

Plus, traditional email archives on-premises have proven to be cumbersome to scale and manage. A modern email archive in the cloud is convenient, scalable, and fast, and frees up your IT team to solve bigger problems.

10) E-Discovery

You can learn a lot about someone by what they put in their emails. This can prove important if an employee requires monitoring.

"From a discovery point of view," says Bob Tarzey, director at analyst firm Quocirca, "If you're asked a question about what information you hold on an individual, archived emails are one of the main sources you check to find this stuff."

With an email archive, these searches are made easy. Any email that has been sent will be saved and ready to be recalled and investigated at a moments notice.

Modern email archiving in the cloud delivers search that is more powerful than legacy on-premises approaches. Plus, as the customer, you do not need to maintain the search indexing infrastructure. Gone are the days of scheduled searches that take hours or days to return results. In the cloud, a search that has a result count of 1.5 million items can return in less than one second!

For more information about modern, cloud-based email archiving visit HubStor today.