Email is today’s business communication tool. It forms binding contracts with customers, suppliers and employees; it records negotiations, purchase orders and business commitments. Effective email archiving creates a complete record of communication both within and outside your business. Not to archive email leaves both the business and its employees, vulnerable to risk.
Creating a secure central email archive of all business email data can be an expensive and technically complex undertaking. The larger an organisation, the more mail servers and locations need to be incorporated, the more challenging and indeed the more important it is to have centralised email archiving.
[LINK]Why most organizations don’t archive email.
The pros, cons, and benefits of email archiving.
Email Archiving the hard way. In-house.
In-house email archiving projects tend to consume a disproportionate percentage of budgets relative to other IT initiatives. Data volumes simply grow too large too quickly to store and secure effectively within budget, time and technology constraints. This information is also expected to be online, searchable and instantly retrievable by the business at all times.
Limitations of in-house archiving:
Complexity of back-up
Email data must be stored on resilient hardware and be backed up, ideally in real-time, to one or more offsite locations. As data volumes grow, traditional backup and recovery strategies or disk to disk replication approaches become less effective.
Fast growing and unpredictable data volumes
In-house email archiving systems do not scale at a software level and cannot perform adequately when required to handle large and rapidly growing volumes of data. Mistakes can be costly as large volumes of data inevitably encounter a performance degradation threshold.
Email Archiving the easy way with Mimecast.
Mimecast’s online email archiving service is immediately affordable, has predictable ongoing costs and requires less maintenance than in-house archiving methods.
Scales to support your growing data needs
Mimecast automatically stores email securely offsite and lets you access and search your email archive online. It stores all incoming, outgoing and internal email for up to 10 years with no requirement for hardware or software. Our storage grid is designed to manage the traffic of thousands of customers simultaneously.
Search and retrieve archived email in seconds
All of your email is searchable with sub-second response times. Employees can search their own personal email archives and authorized managers, for example select HR or legal professionals, can have access to the whole database. Accessing email is easy and intuitive either directly through Microsoft Outlook or online via the webmail facility.
A unified email solution
Email archiving ideally should be part of a unified system, not just another siloed application. Gaining the full benefit of your email data is possible when all key functions are unified as a single solution and not doing so risks leaving the business with an incomplete set of data.
That’s why a Unified Email Management approach is critical. An email service cannot be optimally managed, monitored and called upon when different components of an email reside in fragments across separate email technologies that are not inter-operable or linked. Mimecast addresses this by bringing together email archiving, security, and continuity into a single best practice service.
Compliant and secure
Mimecast gives IT administrator’s control over exactly who can see what in the email archive. It also keeps full audit trails on every search and every access to email as well as system access, policy creation and changes.
Single view of global email archive
By providing a single online email archive, with a searchable view across an enterprise’s entire global dataset, you can remove need for multiple email archive systems, and offload the intense demands of storage and global email data management to Mimecast.
Supporting multi-site, multi-domain architectures
With Mimecast you can rest assured that your email archive is secure and protected. We store your email in a triple-redundant, multi-site archive and we encrypt it, so that only authorized users can gain access. Our storage architecture has been designed and built to serve 10,000’s of enterprises simultaneously.
