The role of email archiving in cyber resilience

Emails have been a necessity for decades now. Organizations across the globe use email as the only formal mode of communication. All types of important information, such as documents, agreements, contracts, and designs, are shared over emails. With these different kinds of data being exchanged over email, emailing serves not just as a mode of communication but also as a source of truth and a legal record.

While companies realize the importance of the data stored in emails, it's inevitable that threat actors also know this fact. They're constantly looking for ways in which they can manipulate organizations and use this data to their benefit. Apart from the threats posed by hackers, there are multiple ways in which emails or other sensitive data get deleted or lost.

With most data being digital these days, organizations are burdened with the responsibility of safeguarding this data. Even in situations where the organization faces data loss or corruption, they need to be prepared to run their business with minimal disruption. This broadly explains the concept of cyber resilience. In this article, we'll go through what cyber resilience is, the need for it, and how email archiving can help with achieving it. But before we delve into that, let's take a look at the different ways in which emails can get lost, deleted, or corrupted.

How do emails get lost or deleted?

Emails serve as the only mode of formal communication in many scenarios. Therefore, it's vital to ensure that emails are securely preserved for retrieval whenever required. However, due to certain inevitable reasons, emails could get lost, deleted, or corrupted. Let's discuss some of the ways in which this could happen.

Accidental deletion

As obvious as it sounds, one of the most common ways in which emails get lost is on account of accidental deletion by an organization's employees. However securely you guard your emails, the fact remains that the end users of those emails are your company's employees. With manual involvement, there's always the chance of errors cropping up. Your employees could end up deleting certain emails without realizing their importance or even just to free up space in their mailboxes.

While there's the possibility of recovering emails from the trash folder, when the emails are needed after the trash cleanup, the damage is done. To account for such errors, it's essential to have a secure copy of emails.

Insider threats

While your employees can delete emails by accident or due to negligence, an even more dangerous threat is when employees delete emails on purpose. Until your organization's admins or other officials realize the occurrence of such activities, it remains a threat.

Employees can get rid of important emails for various reasons. A disgruntled employee or one who's been paid off by a competitor may delete emails to land the company in legal trouble. Sometimes, such a deletion can occur if the email contains information that could land an employee in trouble due to a probable escalation. Such internal threats need to be accounted for with secure archiving practices.

External threats

Over the past year, the number of security threats to emails has increased exponentially. Hackers are always finding innovative ways to pass through email defenses and steal sensitive data. These email breaches come in many ways. Hackers can get access to email accounts and view your sensitive data. The larger trouble comes when the hacker deletes emails to cause disruption.

Another probable way is when hackers gain access to the email account and lock the owner out of their own accounts. In these cases, the hacker demands a ransom payment; failing that, they threaten to delete emails and refuse to give access back to the employees' email accounts.

Data corruption

Apart from email deletion due to manual errors, it's also possible for emails to be lost as a result of technical errors. The email provider may encounter issues that could lead to the organization losing access to its emails. Although unusual, these technical issues could end with data being corrupted, in which case the emails won't be in a readable or properly reproducible format, or it could end up with data being deleted altogether.

What is cyber resilience?

Cyber resilience refers to an organization's ability to protect its digital data from cyber threats, withstand any possible external or internal attacks, and recover from a data breach or attack to resume normal business operations without significant monetary, operational, or reputational damage to the organization.

If an organization is cyber resilient, it means that the company can continue delivering their products and offerings to customers even if a security incident occurs. This incident could come in the form of a cyberattack, a service downtime, or a natural or even a man-made disaster. Even when such incidents occur, the company should be prepared to mitigate such attacks and carry forward their operations without any downtime.

To be cyber resilient, the company's executives should prepare an effective risk management and business continuity strategy that needs to be passed down to all employees of the organization. Having preventive measures to avoid these incidents and having a secure backup for operations and data management can help organizations achieve cyber resilience.

Why is cyber resilience important?

While security incidents or disasters seem inevitable, it's prudent to have a plan in place to ensure that your organization is well-positioned to handle such situations with ease. Being cyber resilient protects companies from cyber threats, ensures business continuity, aids in disaster recovery, and also ensures that the organization complies with legal and regulatory requirements. Let's take a detailed look at what makes cyber resilience crucial for organizations.

Cybersecurity

Every organization comes head-to-head with cyber threats. With the evolving threat landscape, organizations need to be better prepared than ever before to prevent these attacks from causing damage to their organization. In addition to ensuring that they're prepared to prevent cyber attacks, organizations also need a plan to handle the attack and overcome the challenges that it poses.

Having a robust cybersecurity policy in place can help organizations secure their data and employees. This not only makes sure your data is guarded, but also protects your organization from legal consequences and non-compliance with regulations. This helps customers develop trust in your company, leading to higher credibility as a whole.

Business continuity

Business continuity refers to an organization's ability to sustain or resume its operation soon after a disruption. With evolving business needs, every organization is expected to have a business continuity plan in place. In fact, many customers make their decision to go with a particular product only after ensuring they have an efficient business continuity plan in place.

Cyber resilience is vital for business continuity. If your business isn't prepared to continue its operations smoothly, it could incur huge financial losses, put the business at risk of legal exposure, and risk losing customers who are unhappy with the service disruption.

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery refers to the process of restoring a business's IT infrastructure and data to its previous state after a security incident or other disruption has occurred. In the unfortunate event that a business experiences a disruption, they need to have a process to restore their data to its original state and proceed with their business operations.

The goal of disaster recovery is to set up a process such that the impact caused to the business and their customers is minimal. Because emails form the core communication mode for many companies, one of the major aspects of disaster recovery include robust practices to archive and backup email data. It also requires a means of recovering that data if it has been removed or lost.

Legal and compliance requirements

All regulated industries have a set of compliance laws and regulations that they need to adhere to. Apart from these industries, it's also good practice for all organizations to follow the regulations that have been formulated for a particular region to industry. An organization's cyber resilience strategy helps them adhere to these laws. Having a plan in place helps companies avoid the possibility of a data breach or leak and has mitigation measures formulated, even if such an incident occurs.

Similarly, a cyber resilience strategy is important to ensure that an incident doesn't tarnish the company's reputation. It protects companies from being dragged into legal proceedings and facing severe monetary and reputational damages from their customers and the public.

How do you achieve cyber resilience?

Every organization must have a robust cyber resilience plan to ensure that they can keep their business operations running as usual. To achieve cyber resilience, a well-structured policy should be enforced to all employees using a top-down approach. When the senior officials in the company adopt the policy, it creates a sense of responsibility amongst all employees, improving its adoption.

The core aspects that need to be checked to achieve cyber resilience involve developing mechanisms for quick breach detection and policies for responding to the threat or breach. Apart from detection and response, it's also important to have a mechanism that will help with recovery of data. This is a crucial step in bringing business operations back to normal. One way to achieve data recovery and business continuity is by making sure that there's a secure archive of email data.

The role of email archiving in cyber resilience

Email archiving plays a vital role in achieving cyber resilience. An email archiving solution maintains a secure archive of your email data, ensuring that your emails don't go missing, even if an incident strikes your organization's defenses. You'll always have your emails stored safely, ready for retrieval, whenever required. Let's take a look at how email archiving helps with cyber resilience.

Protect your organization from data breaches

Across the globe, the number of cybersecurity incidents that crop up every day has been on the rise. Phishing emails that are looking to extract account information might gain access to users' email accounts and lock the owner out of their account. At times, emails containing malware might make their way into mailboxes and lock the email account or the entire system.

In such situations, there's no way to know how hackers misuse or clear email data. To ensure that emails don't get lost as a result of the hack, it's important to maintain an archive of the emails. By securing your emails in an archiving solution, you can be sure that your organization's sensitive information will be protected, even if a hacker gains access to your data.

Never lose sight of your data

Email archiving ensures that a secure, easily retrievable copy of all email data is stored in a secure location. If a security incident causes disruption to your business, having an email archive is helpful. Because all emails are securely archived, you can rest assured that none of your emails are lost or corrupted. You can use your archival storage to recover emails into your email provider. If required, you can also retrieve the emails that are important in a specific scenario using the eDiscovery search option.

Stay on top of regulatory requirements

Emails contain an organization's most important information. All kinds of data, such as receipts, invoices, contracts, reports, and finances, are present within emails. Newer regulations and laws are coming up across the globe to ensure that customer data as well as company data is well protected. Most of these laws mandate that emails containing certain types of information, such as payment or legal information, need to be retained for a specific amount of time.

Mostly, this data will be available in your organization's email environment. If a security incident comes up, your company needs to be prepared, even if the emails in your email provider are lost. With an archiving solution in place, it's easy for companies to stay compliant with regulations by setting up customizable retention policies for different emails. Just because your company encounters an incident, you're not going to be exempted from the laws and regulations that the company needs to adhere to. Having an email archival plan will help organizations stay vigilant and resume their operations smoothly after a disruption.

Come what may, keep your business running

In addition to being prepared for any eventualities that arise after a security incident has caused disruption to your business, it's important to think about keeping your business running with minimal downtime. If an incident occurs, it's possible that you don't have access to your emails. Because it's impossible to conduct business without email access, a sound business continuity plan also needs to take email archiving into consideration.

With an email archiving solution in place, even if your emails have been deleted or lost, you can restore your mailboxes to their original state. This way, your emails will always be available, and you can keep your business running with zero fear of losing your important data.

eProtect's role in ensuring cyber resilience

eProtect is a cloud-based email archiving and security solution that provides cloud-based email archiving for cloud and on-premise email providers. The solution offers secure email archiving, quick eDiscovery, and customizable retention policies to ensure organizations are cyber resilient in the event of security or technical incident. eProtect is the archiving solution powering Zoho Mail, a platform trusted by millions of users.