Not WHY but HOW important is Email Archiving for Your Business – PART (I)

In today’s electronically connected business world, emails are the industry standard for communications.  Whether it is contracts or sales order; employment offer letter or resignation, email is used for all forms of communication.  All the forms of communications are accepted as official communication.  And they hold same legal sanctity as written documents.

Email has provided many benefits to in communication.  It is easy to use. It provides instant and cost-effective communication.  These are some of the reasons why a majority of the business transactions happens via email.

Email communication is still seeing exponential growth because of these reasons.  As per a Gartner report on worldwide email trends published in 2012:

• A mind boggling 144 billion emails were exchanged per day globally 2012.
• The email traffic is predicted to grow to 192 billion messages per day by 2016. 
• 89 billion business emails were sent and received in 2012.
•  Daily business email will grow to 143 billion business messages by 2016.

The challenge faced by business is how to manage all these emails.  Although email is a vital part of business communication but email servers have physical limitations.  Each emails takes needs space on the email server and eventually there is no room left for more emails. The businesses usually have one of two options available to them:

1. Delete the older emails to make room for the new emails
2. Implement quota on users emails

Delete the older emails to make room for the new emails

There is a huge risk of deleting important emails when businesses delete older email for new emails.  There is also a chance the business is not complying with industry regulation.  The businesses should avoid taking this risk.

Implement quota on users emails

This option is less risky.  The businesses take into account the departments and within department the job function.  A quota system is implemented based on this information.  Although less risky but it is still very time intensive and cumbersome option.

There are better options available to solve this problem.  Email archiving solutions are designed to specifically tackle this challenge while satisfying the requirement of end users, information technology department and legal & industry regulatory requirements.

In second part of the blog we will go over how email archiving is beneficial on individual level and business level.