Does email archiving help save email storage?

Email remains one of the most commonly used modes of communication in business settings. It serves as an immutable source of truth that can be relied upon as evidence in many important business scenarios. All important communication that goes on in an organization—whether it's contracts, business agreements, or other intellectual property—is all stored within emails. Securing this data to ensure seamless business operations is of the utmost importance. 

One of the ways to secure this data is to preserve these emails for the duration mandated by compliance regulations. Emails should be stored in an easily retrievable format in a secure environment. But storing a large volume of emails for extended periods of time with your email provider presents a huge challenge. Complementing your email provider with an email archiving solution can solve this problem. In this article, we'll discuss how email archiving can help you better manage the storage with your email provider. 

What is email archiving?

Email archiving is the process of preserving email data in a secure, tamper-proof environment over a long duration. In addition to many other benefits, archiving is commonly used when you don't need access to specific emails immediately but you may need them in the future for compliance, audits, backup retrieval, or other purposes. 

The email abundance problem

It's clear that email is the one source of communication that businesses constantly rely on. This poses a problem because the average working person receives 121 emails per day. This number may seem small, but when it's multiplied for an enterprise organization over many years, that number is immense. Many of these emails contain sensitive business information that can't be deleted. This overabundance of emails becomes a tough problem to tackle for an organization's admins, employees, and the IT decision makers.  

The need for long-term email storage

While the long-term retention of emails feels like an overhead cost, there are certain factors that mandate storing older emails until a certain retention period is reached. 

Compliance: Every organization, whether it's a regulated industry or not, is expected to comply with certain regional and industrial compliance standards. Some of these regulations mandate that certain types of communication need to be stored for a specified duration. This creates the need for storing emails based on the retention period that your company must observe. 

Legal evidence: It's not uncommon for companies to get caught up in legal proceedings. If your organization ever gets into a legal battle—either with a client, a partner, or even an employee—you'll need evidence that can be produced in court to make your case and prove your innocence. Emails are legally permissible proof, and because the evidence could be buried in years' worth of emails, it's vital to retain those that are most important.

These are two important reasons why older emails need to be stored for a certain duration, and they're decided by the organization's IT decision makers. But long-term retention of data adds to huge amounts of storage taken up on your email provider. 

Managing storage with on email provider

Every organization's administrator faces issues with storage management with their email provider. Given the need for long-term retention of emails and the growing volume of incoming emails encountered every day, both employees and admins struggle with deciding which emails are important and need to be retained. The first solution that comes to mind is to buy storage add-ons for employees based on their role and email usage.

However, scaling up storage to meet every employee's email storage needs becomes difficult after a certain point. The easier solution would be to retain older emails with a secure archiving solution that works in conjunction with your email provider and use your email provider for day-to-day emailing needs.

Email archiving and storage management

Managing your email provider's storage becomes a hassle-free process when you have an email archiving solution in place. You can simply choose to move your older emails that you may not need every day to your archiving solution and delete them from your email provider to create space for the newer incoming emails that may need your day-to-day attention. 

This will help manage storage better with your email provider because the need to keep clearing emails goes down exponentially based on the volume of emails you choose to archive and clear from the email server.

The benefits of archiving older emails

Following this practice of maintaining older emails with your archiving solution and newer ones with your email provider doesn't just solve the problem of storage crunch but also offers many other benefits ranging from performance improvements to ease of management. Let's take a look at some of them. 
 

Improved performance

When the bulk of your emails is with your email provider, you're at risk of overloading the provider's servers. This reduces the efficiency and the speed at which the software can operate. When you choose to move your older emails to your archiving provider, the email solution isn't pushed to its limits and functions at optimal speeds. This means that any operation you perform with your email provider, such as complex searches, email loading, and other bulk operations, are completed faster. 

An increase in your employee's productivity is a factor that needs to be taken into consideration. Slower email solutions cause a loss of productivity, and the longer wait times also frustrate employees.

Cost efficiency

Moving older emails to your archiving solution means that you don't have to keep purchasing storage add-ons for your employees. Even though you'll be paying for your archiving solution, it's more cost-efficient than paying for your email storage. When you upgrade your plan or purchase storage with your email provider, you're probably also paying for emailing features that you may not fully utilize. So using the archiving solution gives you enterprise-grade features and helps you save money.

Avoid data fragmentation

Data fragmentation refers to having critical business data scattered across multiple servers, databases, and software solutions. When you have a copy of all your emails, both new and old, with your archiving solution, all of the data is preserved in one place, and you'll be able to fetch just the email you're looking for quickly without the hassle of searching for it in multiple places. This is a crucial feature, especially when there's a ticking clock, such as critical business meetings, court proceedings, and other similar situations. 

Reduced risk of data loss

The risk of human error can never be fully avoided. Your employees use their emails extensively, and they're prone to make mistakes because there's a constant influx of requests they need to keep up with. If your email provider is the only source of data available, it could lead to loss of data if an employee deletes an email accidentally. With an email archiving solution, the administrators and a select few employees will be the only ones with access to the emails. In such cases, there's a minimal chance of human error, and many protective controls are in place to ensure that data doesn't get deleted or corrupted by mistake. 

Fast eDiscovery

Email archiving solutions are designed to store emails safely and retrieve them quickly. Any email that you want to look at can be fetched within seconds. Archiving solutions provide complex search functions that can perform and narrow down the email you're looking for to the most minute detail possible. 

Compliance with regulatory standards

The regional and industrial mandates for your company necessitate that emails be stored for a specific number of years. This varies depending on which laws you need to comply with and the kind of data present in your emails. With an archiving solution in place, instead of manually deleting or retaining emails per the retention period, you can configure retention policies with your archiving solution. This automates the entire process, and you can relax knowing that your email compliance is taken care of.

Simpler admin management

With a copy of your organization's emails secured with your email archiving solution, you will have far fewer queries related to storage expansion from your employees. Every time a query for an email comes up, you won't have to rely on your employees to fetch them. You can simply use the email archiving solution. This reduces the load on the organization's admins and makes their job a lot easier.

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.