Organizations across the globe are using emails like never before. Emails have not only become critical facilitators of day-to-day communication but have also emerged as one of the most powerful and effective collaboration tools. Their importance in today's business environment can be gauged from the fact that over 75% of business critical information in a company is stored in emails. Looked from another perspective, emails have also become the most significant record keeper of key developments, decisions and discussions in organizations. It is unimaginable to think of an organization where key business decisions have not been discussed or finalized over email. "Send me an email" or "we will discuss this over the mail" are the oft-spoken lines in almost all organizations.

Email Challenges
While on the one hand emails have surely helped organizations and their workers to collaborate more effectively, speed up decision making process, increase productivity and work more efficiently, on the other, they have also thrown up new challenges. These challenges are mostly around email storage and management. As the dependency on email is growing, so is the amount of emails being exchanged by an average worker. On an average, an individual receives or sends 75 to 100 emails every day as part of his or her official work. The number of emails including attachments is also growing. Obviously, the storage and management of this fast growing volume of data generated by emails is becoming a major challenge for many organizations.

As the number of emails sent or received is growing so is the storage requirement. While organizations are increasingly encountering the issue of email storage, most email programs have performance problems and become unstable if too many mails get stored on them, as these programs are designed to store only a limited number of mails. As emails usually get stored in the user's desktop or other clients' devices, it can be challenging to get them to a central place for the benefit of management as well as for reducing operational costs.

Email storage and management has become all the more critical in the face of several stringent regulations that require proper record keeping of emails. Many regulations require emails to be stored in a way that they can be tracked easily whenever there is a legal need to do so. Most of these regulations require organizations to store email or any other data in a format where it can't be changed, or modified, or deleted, for the set period.

The Solution
What is the best an organization can do to ensure that all mails are stored and managed properly and don't burden the email system? How can it ensure compliance to regulations that require storage of emails for many years for legal purposes? How does an organization manage the hundreds and thousands of critical emails that are stored in their user's desktops or other devices? Can all emails be stored in a central location to save costs and overcome operational glitches? How can they be made accessible to users or regulatory authorities on demand? So many questions, but what is the answer?

Archiving is considered the most appropriate solution to tackle email storage challenges and manage them in a way that not only meets organizational requirements but also compliance needs. An archiving solution can solve all the critical challenges posed by emails-storage, management and compliance, and entail many other benefits for an organization. These benefits can be in terms of reduced storage costs or a lower TCO of email operation or reduced administrative overheads. For instance, help desk calls by users triggered by email system performance issues form a significant portion of the TCO. A large number of calls to helpdesks from email users results from performance issues resulting from too many mails in the mail system. Such calls can be reduced by archiving less important mails thereby freeing space in the email system, making it work smoothly. Besides that, other benefits would include enhanced mail user experience and productivity, and reduced critical data loss risk among others. Moreover, as emails contain many business critical information and threads/points to important discussions within an organization, they are an important source of knowledge too.

Good Archiving
It would be a good idea for organizations to first document a detailed email archiving policy that incorporates organizational needs related to compliance, business and knowledge management. A well-documented policy can then form the basis for deploying an email archiving solution that best meets the organization's needs. Such a document should also be complimented with a detailed user guideline.

What all should a good archiving solution provide? An archiving solution must make sure that archived mails are accessible and secure. It is important that in order to make archived emails easily available in times of critical needs, for instance, audit, they must be easy to search and access. As such, any archiving solution must have a very effective and fast search feature that can search mails on multiple criteria using language-based, address-based, key word based, and other techniques. That can be one way where organizations are able to quickly turnaround the required data from emails, thereby serving their objectives not just in meeting legal requirements but also its needs of business critical information and knowledge management. In other words, CEOs, CFOs, HR managers, legal and compliance officers should be quickly and easily able to find emails they are looking for. It is noteworthy here that an average organization will always have thousands of records in its mail archive and getting the right record in a given time could be very challenging and difficult if the search features in the archiving solution is not optimized.

Moreover, the solution must be highly scalable and self-healing as the capacity needs are likely to continue to grow apace. The need for archiving space will continue to grow at the same pace as the volume of email. As such, it is imperative that the archiving solution is one that can be scaled quickly.

A key requirement that any archiving solution must meet is that of data security. As compliance requirements entail that emails should be stored in a way that they cannot be modified or tempered with or deleted, an archiving solution must ensure data integrity.

Email volumes are definitely going to continue growing faster with each passing day. Very soon it is likely that all critical business information will reside in emails. Given that, archiving will be critical for proper management and use of emails in organizations.

Ravi Shekhar Pandey
The Author is with Springboard Research

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