All the recent fuss about email in the news today brings an important piece of advice to mind, and that is that email archiving and regulatory compliance are more important than ever to business. In fact, archiving is essential in markets such as education, government and finance -- where protecting email data  is an important legal and human resources issue, says Rory Welch, CEO of ArcMail, a Bossier City, La. provider of email archiving solutions.
According to Welch, there are three key reasons that government and education-focused organizations should consider implementing archiving solutions in 2013 and beyond:
1. e-Discovery: Always Critical
Email messages are subject to e-discovery (the practice of discovery, during civil litigation, surrounding the exchange of information in electronic format), which means businesses are required to keep them in the event they are requested for legal proceedings. But the effort to comply with e-discovery requests is very time consuming and can entail searching through years' and years' worth of email, which is why there are a number of technology solutions that address this challenge. These offerings can index and archive all email messages and related attachments -- and do it instantly, offering the ability to search across widespread data repositories from a single location.
Automatically archiving email messages is very popular in business today. It allows organizations to simplify the process of protecting and accessing email data, and provides an easy and automatic way to ensure that efficient and adequate liability and e-discovery protection is in place.
Beyond email archiving, customers in government, legal and financial markets are also in need of archiving to protect other forms of business communications such as instant messaging data as well as content across Salesforce , SharePoint and other applications and platforms. All of this is considered corporate data, and therefore is subject to e-Discovery.
2. Education Market Continues to Move to Google Apps Email
Archiving's growth in the education market has been significant in the past year, with more and more schools moving to Google Apps email to take advantage of the convenience and affordability it offers. These schools -- whether universities or K-12 institutions -- might want to consider an archiving solution that integrates Google-hosted email with email from other corporate sources such as Microsoft Exchange, taking a centralized, hybrid approach to meeting their archiving and data protection needs. The best archiving solutions will be able to simultaneously retrieve, index and archive all email messages -- whether they are hosted by traditional email servers or as part of cloud -based corporate Google accounts. This approach provides more simplicity to busy school IT administrators and speeds up e-Discovery when organizations are dealing with multiple types of content and email platforms because they can simultaneously search across all data sources. (continued...)
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