18 / 02 / 2014
Email may be admitted as evidence in court proceedings so
organisations need to consider the practical issues this raises. These
issues include taking steps to enhance the reliability of email
evidence, to manage the storage of email effectively and to have
appropriate controls in place regarding its use.
Emails ideally need to be archived at source and encrypted to guarantee authenticity.
Aside from the legal aspect there are many technical benefits to email archiving. Email servers such as Microsoft Exchange were initially designed as a straightforward messaging system i.e. to send information for one person to another – it was never designed as a filing system.
Users are creatures of habit and they like to keep emails ‘just in case’ they might need it at some point in the future and this coupled with the year on year exponential increase in email traffic has led to some bloated and cumbersome email environments. This makes searching and find important email information extremely difficult.
The quick fix solution is to archive emails to PST files but this is risky. Microsoft no longer support PST file archiving on network drives plus PST files are liable to corrupt. This quick fix suddenly becomes the norm and before you know it you have a major storage issue on your hands with emails on Exchange server AND spread across the network in PST files.
The only way to tackle these issues head on is to put in place some kind of strategy for email archiving.
Mailsafe for example lets you archive all emails to a secure, central database with encryption and single instance storage – users can still access these archived emails directly from Outlook. So in an instant the email retention headache can be dealt with. PST files can be imported and removed from the network and the organisation can be sure that they can find any email should they need to do so in a matter of seconds.
Keeping things ‘just in case’ used to cause issues but now it can be turned into a positive for organisations ‘just in case’ they need to locate that one pesky email. Email archiving really is suitable for all.
Emails ideally need to be archived at source and encrypted to guarantee authenticity.
Aside from the legal aspect there are many technical benefits to email archiving. Email servers such as Microsoft Exchange were initially designed as a straightforward messaging system i.e. to send information for one person to another – it was never designed as a filing system.
Users are creatures of habit and they like to keep emails ‘just in case’ they might need it at some point in the future and this coupled with the year on year exponential increase in email traffic has led to some bloated and cumbersome email environments. This makes searching and find important email information extremely difficult.
The quick fix solution is to archive emails to PST files but this is risky. Microsoft no longer support PST file archiving on network drives plus PST files are liable to corrupt. This quick fix suddenly becomes the norm and before you know it you have a major storage issue on your hands with emails on Exchange server AND spread across the network in PST files.
The only way to tackle these issues head on is to put in place some kind of strategy for email archiving.
Mailsafe for example lets you archive all emails to a secure, central database with encryption and single instance storage – users can still access these archived emails directly from Outlook. So in an instant the email retention headache can be dealt with. PST files can be imported and removed from the network and the organisation can be sure that they can find any email should they need to do so in a matter of seconds.
Keeping things ‘just in case’ used to cause issues but now it can be turned into a positive for organisations ‘just in case’ they need to locate that one pesky email. Email archiving really is suitable for all.