Saurangshu Kanunjna

Today each enterprise, irrespective of its size, deals with thousands of e-mail on a daily basis. Most of these -mail contain essential business critical information and data. The huge explosion of e-mail messages has prompted many enterprises, to look beyond e-mail back-ups.

A prime reason for the popularity of e-mail archival applications is the explosion of email messages as well as concerns about regulatory compliance and associated threats. Irrespective of size and stature, each enterprise is subjected to have legal data retention requirements.

Most of the legal data is exchanged via e-mail. So, it becomes essential to archive these business critical mails in such a manner that they can be put forward within a stipulated period of time and without much fuss, should a need arise. Failure to comply with such requests can lead to huge losses for an enterprise.

Benefits


E-mail archival helps organizations index, store and retrieve critical e-mail and important file attachments in an automated manner. It records the details and content of each mail sent or received by an organization in a tamper-proof and auditable manner.

E-mail archival solutions help improve the performance of the e-mail server by off-loading content from the production server. Archiving also helps users to get access to business critical mails irrespective of their age. It eliminates the need to create risky .PST/.NSF files and enforce consistent e-mail policies.


Archiving also ensures more free space and hence lower storage cost. One of the main driving force toward archival of e-mails is compliance with statutory regulations, as organizations need to provide access to regulators when asked to do so. Another important factor is litigation support.

In the traditional e-mail archival system, where information is spread across several systems within an organization, it becomes difficult to provide e-mails in support of litigation. Some of the compliance regulations generally met by most e-mail archiving solutions are: Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002: Security and Exchange Commission (SEC); HiPAA; and NASD.