
Secure, Comply, Retain: The Case for Enterprise Email Archiving Today
Email has been the cornerstone of communication in business operations for ages. While we rely on it daily, we often overlook the enormous volume of sensitive information that it carries, including large volumes of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), financial data, authentication and access credentials to business-critical tools, strategic roadmaps, board-level discussions and even Protected Health Information (PHI) in regulated industries. Email repositories are vast organizational data sources and just like any other, they must be managed to protect all sets of sensitive information. As email volumes grow, the need to apply best practice data management principles like Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) becomes pivotal. Businesses must focus on the archiving, protection, and eventual disposal of historical email data to reduce risk, control storage costs, and maintain compliance. Implementing an enterprise-class email archiving solution facilitates in offloading the stale and inactive data into a secure and centralized archive. This ensures that the information is retained in accordance to the regulatory policies, devoid of any unwanted altercation and readily available for e-Discovery or during any legal proceedings.
Regulatory Compliance
In today’s world, various industries are facing stringent regulatory guidelines and compliance norms. For instance;
- The finance institutions must comply with FINRA and SEC guidelines
- Life sciences and healthcare are governed by HIPAA rules and,
- Public companies must abide by the rules of SOX.
One of the primary mandates requires these organizations mapped to different industries to retain emails for a specified period and a flexibility to retrieve any given emails at any point in time. An advanced archival solution is of utmost necessity for automatically capturing and storing emails in a tamper-proof and encrypted format, ensuring enhanced security and integrity.
Data Security and Governance
Emails are prone to phishing scams, cyber-attacks and internal data leaks. A unified, secured and cloud-based archival solution which meets the AES 256 encryption standards will ensure that archived emails are encrypted, access-controlled and protected from unauthorized altercations. Alongside data security, these next-gen solutions are instrumental in providing organizations with control over the retention time period, accessibility and retirement of the email data. This minimizes the risk of data breaches and ensures compliance with data privacy laws such as GDPR, GLBA and CCPA.
e-Discovery Readiness
During litigations and legal proceedings, situations may arise whereby businesses are asked to produce certain relevant documents quickly and reliably. Such tasks can be generally cumbersome and time-intensive. As a result of which a centralized archive with an advanced and intelligent search feature is required, which can perform faster and efficient eDiscovery mapped searches across all inboxes based on a keyword or multiple filters to quickly identify emails of interest with a higher degree of relevancy. Such an archive can also provide additional capabilities in terms of tagging and legal hold. This, in turn, reduces time consumption, optimizes costs and decreases risks of non-compliance and sanctions during proceedings.
Accessibility and Usability
With an exponential rise in email communications, searching for relevant emails, organizing those emails and finding a relevant email for a specific task (for e-Discovery related tasks) has become unfeasible and extremely cumbersome. A smart and intelligent archival solution, which just not only locks away communications but also enables seamless accessibility and facilitates in accurately finding out a specific email from the archive, is a must have. This would expedite the retrieval process, enhance productivity and ensure that any valuable information that has been stored is never under-utilized.
Storage Optimization
Modern email systems have their limitations, vis-à-vis, they have restricted storage capacity and were never designed to store years of historical communications. Storing an unprecedented number of emails in active mailboxes hampers performance, increases storage costs and creates potential cyber threats. By archiving these email communications, there’s a massive reduction in server loads and substantial improvement in the system performance which in turn reduces costs significantly.
Conclusion
Organizations are pivoting towards modernizing their IT infrastructure which has accelerated the adoption of a unified, cloud-based and integrated Email Archiving solution. This has become a business-critical tool and is being avidly leveraged by businesses pre-dominantly as part of their Business Continuity Management (BCM) strategy. Be it a small enterprise or a major organization, investment in an email archiving solution will pay dividends when it comes to mitigating cyber risks, avoiding non-compliances from legal proceedings and clocking higher productivity.
SOLIXCloud Email Archiving Platform is a fully managed email archiving as-a-service solution that simplifies eDiscovery, seamlessly navigates through stringent regulation and compliances, and facilitates efficient management of email growth. SOLIXCloud Email Archiving offers an intelligent, secure, highly scalable, and user-friendly email archiving solution for enterprises of all sizes. Powered by SOLIXCloud’s Common Data Platform, email archiving simplifies the implementation of a centralized ILM compliance strategy for all types of organizational data including structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data.