EMAIL ARCHIVING What it is, what it isn t, and how it can improve your business operations
OVERVIEW: Why businesses are turning to email archiving As your business grows, communication between you and customers becomes increasingly critical to your success. For many companies email is the most popular form of contacting those people you do business with. However, the sheer volume of these emails can soon number in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. Yes, you realize that you need to keep them for future reference. But this vast amount of messages can put a tremendous burden on your servers and network eventually slowing communications for everyone. With so many emails it can also become increasingly difficult to find specific communications when the need arises. For these reasons many businesses are now turning to email archiving. It s a way for businesses of all sizes to store and quickly retrieve emails by off-loading them from your main servers. keeps your network flowing smoothly and allows you, your employees, and others with permission, to quickly pinpoint older emails that are no longer in their inbox. This archiving helps you comply with regulatory requirements such as SOX, and to make informed decisions should a lawsuit, internal investigation or other issue surface. But more than simply protection, email archiving also helps improve your business as you can find important information quickly (such as email from years back with lost contact information, sales proposals or other business information). 2
With the rapid growth of cloud-based email platforms, email archiving is also a complementary and natural addition to this mix. Businesses are able to further leverage their new technologies to best create a central archive for email and all critical information resources. In fact, the end results of email archiving is more than security, as the technology works to improve IT operations, simplify application upgrades, improve mailbox management, With email archiving, businesses are able to further leverage their new technologies to best create a central archive for email and all critical information resources. and meet critical service level agreements. In this brief ebook we ll define email archiving more specifically, explain the difference between email archiving and backup, and discuss options you have for implementing a successful archiving solution. 3
vs. backup
Perhaps the most common misconception about email archiving is that it is similar to backup. However, archiving and backup are two very different processes designed for two distinct purposes. Backup is designed for disaster recovery, such as when your servers fail from a mechanical or environmental problem. With backup you periodically take a point-in-time snapshot of all the information on your computer network. This can include not only your email but software programs and other information as well. Usually, the information that you backup is easily accessible for only a certain amount of time until the next backup occurs. Then after 30 days or so, it is erased or stored in a manner that s not easy to find, access or retrieve. Another differentiator of backup, from an email retention point of view, is that if an email is erased by an employee before it gets backed-up, it will not be included on the next backup. Going back to try and find this specific email is troublesome, if not impossible, as you would have to know the exact time-frame to look for. For example, if a business wanted to find an email from two years ago they would have to know the exact date, find the backup tape, download the emails and then search the emails. This process often takes a full day or longer. Each email is journaled to the archive, with one copy going to the recipient and one copy going to the archive., on the other hand, is an accumulated set of all incoming and outgoing emails your company receives. You can decide how long to keep the email, including saving all emails for as long as you need. Each email is journaled to the archive, with one copy going to the recipient and one copy going to the archive. This way, when an employee or customer deletes any specific email, it still remains in the archive. With search capability built into email archiving, it is also simple for you, your IT administrators, or even outside counsel to find specific emails by searching for individual words, dates, senders or other criteria. If you manage your mail servers on-premise, another advantage of email archiving is that you can off-load emails to the archive so your servers will run faster. For example, you can allow your local email server to store only emails from the past one month. All older emails are archived on separate servers where they can be accessed when needed. How ediscovery improves with email archiving ediscovery is the process of finding important information you need for lawsuits, and it becomes critical if a lawsuit or other legal issue occurs. With all of your communications safely stored and easily retrieved, you or your legal counsel can quickly become educated 5
on the subject at hand. Searching by topic, word, word combinations, date, sender, recipient or other criteria, teams can get up-to-speed on matters and use the insights for informed decisions. Your individual employees can also easily and intuitively search for older emails through their email inbox. It is nothing less than the intelligence you need to help you efficiently retain, search and discover information. keeps all critical information safe Another advantage of archiving comes not for protection, but for situations where you need to retrieve business intelligence in older emails. Perhaps someone on your sales team has left, but you need the contact information of a potential customer he or she emailed. Or you may have submitted a sales quote to a customer last year, and now want to quickly recreate that quote for a similar customer. These are just a few of the ways retrieved information can help a business. Which email archiving solution is right for you? If you realize that email archiving can help improve your business, the next step is to find a solution best-suited for your unique needs. You will undoubtedly want a solution that s able to offset the burden of email storage from your local servers. This will help ensure that you and your employees have fast access to older messages. You also want a solution that runs the gambit of email archiving. It must be able to recover personal storage table (PST) files that users have saved online, making them quickly accessible for discovery requests. You ll also want archiving for your many laptop computers. If a laptop is lost, stolen or even damaged and the communications are not archived, the messages will be gone forever. If you are considering a cloud-based email archiving solution, it makes sense to choose a vendor who offers unlimited storage and retention. As needs grow, so can the headaches of hitting unexpected storage ceilings. Optimized storing management making the right call The first decision you will have to make is whether to choose email archiving on premise or in the cloud. Each solution has its own benefits. If you decide to keep all older emails on your email servers, on premise, you can work with your own IT 6
department as opposed to an outside vendor. Some companies want to house their own storage infrastructure. On the other hand, keeping older email in the cloud can be less expensive as you don t have the cost of buying and maintaining the extra storage hardware. As previously mentioned, it also makes sense to ensure that your end users can easily access and search their archives directly from their inbox. This is much more efficient and effective than having employees constantly contacting IT for assistance in locating a lost or deleted message. For mobile employees, you should ensure that they can access their archive from a smart phone, tablet PC or via a Web browser (in the event that they do not have access to their email). Also keep in mind that if you have an email continuity solution, it makes sense to have email archiving that works in tandem with it. If disaster strikes, or your email servers go down for maintenance, not only do you want employees to be able to send and receive email you also want those emails backed-up and older emails accessible. Using email archiving to spot trouble before it happens Another reason businesses are increasingly turning to email archiving is that it can play an import role in preventative operations. For example, you can use the search functionality to occasionally search for words which may lead to problems. Examples could be words such as guarantee, words of a sexual nature or profanity. You can also set alerts for certain words or word combinations, which will automatically notify you when these words are used in your company s email communications. Similarly, your legal counsel can also be alerted when emails with problematic words are sent or received. For mobile employees, you should ensure that they can access their archive from a smart phone, tablet PC or via a Web browser (in the event that they do not have access to their email). How to best use archiving for a lawsuit or internal investigation. If and when problems arise in your company, using archiving to track the communications is a critical step in making informed decisions. Within minutes of an issue coming to the surface you can search for related email, using criteria ranging from the sender and recipient to dates and of course key words. At the same time you can provide these emails to your legal counsel, or give them permission to search your archives as well. As every second counts when you re trying to make smart decisions, email archiving can save you valuable time and money. 7
Consider Symantec for your email archiving If you consider the advantages of email archiving to be a good choice for your business, take a look at the options available from Symantec. A leader in the world of online protection, Symantec is now helping more than 30,000 companies archive and retrieve their older emails. Through the Symantec Enterprise Vault and Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud products, today Symantec archives over 12 billion emails and offers twenty four hours a day, seven days a week support to the many companies who rely on Symantec for protection and information retrieval. If you are using a Symantec cloud solution, your emails will be archived to a secure Symantec data center. Learn more Want to know more? Contact us today for a comprehensive solution for your business: Select a solution at the Symantec Small Business Website, your online resource for recommendations, product details, and selection guides. For more information on email archiving solutions for your business, please visit the Enterprise Vault.Cloud Web page. Request a call from a Symantec representative. Share this ebook! Copyright 2012 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec Logo, the Checkmark Logo, and Backup Exec are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Microsoft, Hyper-V, SharePoint, Exchange, and Active Directory are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. 8/12 21261947 8