10 best practices to be followed when archiving emails

Email is one of the most important ways for a business to communicate. Sensitive data, such as ongoing and upcoming project details, financial information, reports, and customer information, resides within a company's email. It's vital that organizations take necessary precautions to guard this data from internal and external threats, in addition to protecting data from deletion, both intentional and accidental. Organizations are also responsible for maintaining certain types of data for specific periods of time to ensure that they're compliant with regional and industrial laws and regulations.

These requirements reinforce the need to archive emails. Archiving keeps a copy of your data safe, making sure it's available for retrieval in case eDiscovery needs come up. In addition, it aids with compliance, legal requirements, and as a secondary copy of data in case a cyberattack strikes your organization. While archiving is essential, it can also become a chore for administrators, given the large email volume, different types of employees, and multiple retention policies. To make the archiving process simpler, we'll do a deep dive into certain common practices that can be observed with email archiving.

What is email archiving?

Email archiving is the process of maintaining a secure and encrypted copy of emails in a secondary environment. Email archiving takes just a few simple steps to protect the data from all types of threats; this data can be retrieved whenever needed. Archiving includes the email content, attachments, and all of the other data that's present in an email. The purpose of archiving is to make sure an immutable and safe copy of emails is always available for any business or legal needs that might arise.

Archiving can be done on the cloud or on-premise based on the needs of each organization. It has become a necessity in the world of modern business communication. This is further cemented by the compliance regulations that are being mandated across the globe, making storage of certain types of email data mandatory for a specific duration.

Why is email archiving important?

Email archiving has become one of the critical components required in business communications. It helps solve a wide range of issues that commonly arise in business scenarios and protects your organization's data. Let's discuss some of the reasons that make email archiving a necessity.

Data protection: All sensitive information that an organization transacts is present in emails, so it's vital for companies to protect this data at all costs. Having a safe secondary copy of these emails, in the form of an electronic archive, keeps this sensitive information from getting into the wrong hands, in addition to preventing permanent deletion.

Compliance: Across the globe, regulatory bodies are coming up with new laws that organizations need to follow. Most of these laws include provisions for the storage of electronic data for a defined period of time. Configure the necessary retention policies by defining the duration for each one. This ensures that your organization's data is secured in accordance with the relevant policies.

eDiscovery: Every business comes across situations where they need to retrieve a specific email for different purposes. It could be an important email that was sent or received by an employee who has left the company, or an email that's not present in a user's mailbox. The eDiscovery process helps with locating the email in question in a few simple and fast steps.

Legal requirements: Legal scenarios are common in businesses. Businesses sometimes have to go head-to-head with other companies, employees, or their customers. As part of a legal enquiry, when there's a need to prove your case in court, emails can help. Fortunately, emails are considered legally permissible evidence. You can look up the email that makes your case with the eDiscovery functionality and produce it in court.

Business continuity: Most companies spend a lot of time researching an email provider before they pick out the one that suits them best. Despite all the effort put into this, it's inevitable that systems and services go through downtime occasionally. It rests on the administrator to plan for such times and ensure that there's a business continuity plan when the regular systems are unavailable. Email archives contain all of your email data and can serve as an emergency mailbox when the need arises.

Cyber threat protection: The growing reliance on email has not escaped the notice of threat actors. They're constantly improving their tactics to monetize businesses' dependency on emails. So even in a situation where a hacker is holding your emails hostage in exchange for ransom, you can rely on your email archive. All of the emails will safely be stored in your email archiving solution, even if your primary data source gets deleted or corrupted.

Storage management: Large volumes of emails are sent and received across an organization every day. Given that it's necessary to maintain all important email data, even those that are years old, the storage needed for the same is equally large and expensive. With an archiving solution in place, you can simply hold a copy of your older emails only in the email archive and clear them from your email provider to make space for the newer emails.

Best practices for email archiving

Following a few best practices can result in productive email archiving if the process is done efficiently.

Create different sets of retention policies

A retention policy refers to the set of conditions, durations, and other rules based on which emails will be retained in the archiving portal. All email archiving solutions provide options to configure a default retention policy and multiple custom retention policies.

Make use of such functionalities in your archiving solution to create different sets of retention policies for the employees in your company. For each retention policy, set a retention period, the conditions based on which emails need to be retained, and the type of emails to be retained. Based on the importance of each employee and the kind of emails they usually deal with, apply the relevant policies to your employees. For example, contract employees' emails can be retained under one policy; emails containing financial information can be retained under a different policy, and so on.

Verify the laws and regulations to abide by

Each company will have a set of regulations that they need to follow based on the regulatory body and the region they operate in. All regulated industries need to follow these laws or they'll be subjected to legal action and fines. These regulations mandate that email data of certain types need to be stored for a certain period. While setting up email archiving, this should be one of the primary considerations.

For example, if your organization is in the healthcare sector, you'll need to follow HIPAA which mandates that patient and other healthcare data contained in emails need to be retained for seven years. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) mandates that companies that fall under the finance sector need to retain emails for seven years.

Similarly, many such regulations are in place for organizations that belong to different regulated industry verticals. Make sure you understand the nature of your organization's work, identify the relevant laws and regulations, and make necessary provisions in your archiving solution's retention policy.

Once you've set this up, the retention of necessary data and their deletion after that should be managed automatically, without any interference from your end.

Automate legal hold processes

A legal hold refers to the process in which any electronically stored information (ESI) is held for an interim period without deletion in a tamper-proof format in a secure environment.

This is a process that's commonly used when there's evidence present in the data that's part of an ongoing legal proceeding. In such cases, the court orders the data to be put on legal hold to ensure that no evidence is erased. Most email archiving solutions allow users to search for emails that match certain conditions using their eDiscovery functionality. Any emails that are found relevant will be put on hold.

The archiving solution should support the provision wherein any email that's being held doesn't get deleted, even if the retention duration of the email is over. You'll want to make sure the process of the email being held and deleted after the investigation is automatically done by the archiving solution.

Formulate the policy with all stakeholders

The retention policy will be implemented effectively only if the policy is drafted by involving all of the stakeholders in the company. They'll be able to bring in input from the different scenarios they face, their nature of work, and area of expertise.

In most organizations, stakeholders will include the heads of all the departments and experts from the legal and compliance teams in your company. The legal and compliance heads will be able to articulate what regulations your company needs to follow. Given that every company handles different types of data about financial transactions, customer data, and employee data, chances are that there are multiple regulations that you'll have to follow.

Because department heads understand which of their departments' data needs the highest priority, they'll add value, too. By including all stakeholders, you can ensure that all important data is accounted for.

Account for growing storage requirements

Even if your business starts out small, as your organization and employees grow, you'll have to change your plans accordingly in multiple aspects. One important aspect to keep in mind while planning your email archiving is that storage requirements will grow as your organization grows.

When deciding to archive emails and picking out a provider to do that, make sure you consider the costs involved in adding additional users to the provider and the add-on storage costs for individual users. The archiving provider should be able to make accommodations without any difficulty.

These requirements might be better captured in a cloud email archiving solution as compared to an on-premise one. On-premise solutions aren't as flexible, and you'll have to pay for hardware infrastructure that you won't fully use in the initial stages. Plan for such storage and growth requirements at the beginning of your implementation.

Automate clean-up processes

Email archiving solutions are one way for companies to manage storage in their email provider. Because older emails also contain data that's important for your organization's requirements, years of emails end up getting accumulated in your email provider. To manage storage, you can maintain the older emails only in your archiving solution and remove them from your email provider.

However, even in your archiving solution, it's not ideal to keep years of emails that may take up space. Most archiving solutions provide the option to clean up emails after a specific duration. This can be managed using the retention policy. Make sure that you set up these policies to work automatically in the background without you having to get involved. The policy needs to be set up in a fail-proof manner so that important emails are still securely maintained and older emails are cleaned up, making space for the newer ones.

Assess integration with your email provider

Your email archiving solution needs to work in tandem with your email provider. There are multiple ways in which archiving solutions fetch emails for archival in their storage. These methods may vary based on which email provider you're using.

You may either have to point your MX records to the archiving solution, opt for an API sync, or configure a journal mailbox. Pick the method that's most suitable for your organization by weighing the pros and cons, and assessing how well the method works between your email provider and archival solution. Because this integration defines how seamlessly your mails are archived, it's important to pay attention to this aspect.

Prioritize data security

Your emails contain some of the most sensitive and confidential data of your organization. You place trust in your email archiving solution when you make the choice to host your emails there. So make sure your archiving solution follows the highest standards of security.

The archiving solution should store the data in an encrypted format both in rest and in transit. Emails should be end-to-end encrypted and stored with AES 256 encryption to prevent interception of emails and data leaks. Check whether your archiving solution has the necessary security certifications before you sign on with them. This needs to be complemented by practicing secure email policies within the company for maximum efficiency.

Deploy a test phase

Any new solution can have its pros and cons. But you can't take chances when it comes to the safety of your organization's data. To make sure nothing is unaccounted for, deploy a test phase where you monitor whether all of your policies work as expected.

It's possible that you've left out a certain type of email in your policy just because you missed out a condition. Test out your policies, make sure all relevant employees have archiving enabled, and check your audit trails to look for anything that seems suspicious. This phase will help fill any gaps that are present before a full-fledged implementation.

Pick a robust archiving solution

All of the best practices we've discussed can be achieved efficiently only if the archiving solution is stable, secure, and robust. Do sufficient research and understand the requirements of all departments in your organization before you make the decision to pick an archiving solution.

eProtect is a cloud-based email archiving and security solution that provides email archiving for cloud and on-premise email providers. The solution offers secure email archiving, quick eDiscovery, and data export to ensure organizations stay compliant and ensure data security. eProtect is the archiving solution powering Zoho Mail, a platform trusted by millions of users.