New fundamentals of archiving data

Email is the most important communication and business tool in used by organizations today as it contains business critical data. The growth of email use for external as well as internal communication has created security and storage issues as organizations are finding it difficult to store and maintain the records of all email communication over the years.

Emails have become the electronic substitutes of legal business documentation; the information being passed on through this electronic correspondence constitutes a record. This enforces to retain the email records for a minimum period of time, depending upon the industry sector guidelines.

The email archival is also ensures that organization has a centralized and accessible copy of all its email. This provides additional protection against accidental or intentional deletion of emails by end-users. Searching for email in personal archives on each and every local machine is physically cumbersome and prone to data leakage. Email archiving eliminates such a need whenever litigation support is requested.

The traditional methods of archival include backing up mailbox files (.pst) downloaded on local machine of each individual user. However this method of archival is not foolproof and cumbersome. User may delete the mails from their personal archives before they are backed up by IT team. Also if the mailbox files get corrupt, the complete data is lost.

The cost of finding the electronic records for a discovery process can be astronomical, requiring months of IT manpower to wade through backup tapes. Finding an email record from physically archived tapes is worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Some of the must have features in an archival solution are

1. Completely automated
The archival solution should not need any manual intervention to archive the data. Mails should get archived as soon as they are sent or received by any user of the domain. This archival solution should be device as well as network agnostic. The emails should be archived even if they are sent or received on mobile, laptop, webmail, tablet etc.

2. Compliance Ready
The compliance support is based on three main concepts.
   a. Data permanence - The email data is retained in its original state without being altered or deleted. The authorized users accessing the system should not be able to delete any email. The emails can only be searched, forwarded or printed.
   b. Data security - The archived emails must be stored in the secured datacenter and safeguarded against all security threats which include access by unauthorized persons as well as anything which could physically damage or endanger the availability of the information.
   c. Auditability - The data duly protected but should be easily accessible in a timely manner by authorized personnel whenever required.

3. E-Discovery
Archival email data quickly grows to colossal size. The traditional archiving solution of backing up data on tapes or disks is inadequate to store such data as well as produce the required email whenever asked for auditing or legal purposes. Retrieving the required email from archival takes at least 2 -3 days with dedicated IT personnel working on it.
Archival solution should make sure that the mails are indexed and then stored in the system and administrator should be able to access the archival system from anywhere. It should give advanced search facility with combination of parameters such as 'from address', 'to address', words in 'subject' line, 'attachment name' as well as the mails from specific date range.

4. Download archived mails
If the data is to be produced for legal or audit purpose, administrator should have an option to download the searched mails as a compressed file. The downloaded mails should be compatible with outlook, thunderbird or any other standard mail client.

5. Customizable as per requirement
Archival solution should provide a flexibility to configure number of years for which data needs to be archived. The mails should automatically get deleted once they cross the policy period.
Also archival may not be required for everyone in the company. Administrator should be able to specify the user ids for which the data should be archived.

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