Over 300 billion emails are sent every day; with that sheer volume, email archiving is not just about trying to capture everything that passed through your servers. Any organization should be asking itself – what should my email archive achieve, and how do I design towards this goal?
Let’s recap – what’s an archive?
Archiving is the process of systematically storing, indexing, and securing data for future retrieval. Unlike making backups, this is not usually a case of making a copy and in any case has a different focus. The result should be searchable, tamper-proof, and compliant with legal standards.
Back to the question
When asking what an email archive should achieve, the answer is that it needs to protect, organize, and future-proof your business’ communications. So let’s tackle each of those individually:
Protect
While an archive is not a backup and has different priorities, it still needs to provide a layer of protection to the data. In particular, any emails I archive need to be immutable (cannot be altered from their current form) until their retention period ends. A chain of custody needs to be clear at all times!
Organize
Unlike a backup, an archive isn’t a 1:1 clone of your current production system; it’s a long-term capture of any data that crossed your organization’s servers. As such, you need to ensure the archive remains orderly and that you have a good way of identifying key information at need. This can be through a comprehensive search system or other methods, but good indexing and organization is a must especially once eDiscovery or the Right to be Forgotten come into play.
Future-proof
The name of the game in futureproofing is ensuring scalability and adaptability. Scalability is mostly a question of making sure you can account for increasing data volumes or company growth. Adaptability is harder – it’s the question of if regulatory requirements shift, you can adjust the archive to remain in compliance without a potentially costly change of software.
Your Data in Your hands – With TECH-ARROW
by Matúš Koronthály
Image generated by Canva
