Archiving email is now a must for every business, large or small. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, what you do, or how small you are. If you’re a company, you need to have a robust, secure email archiving policy.
There are five good reasons why small businesses need to be archiving email, and we’re going to discuss them here.
Compliance
Any organization who does business in the US will be subject to one or more regulators. A feature of each of these is the requirement for that business to keep records of all its dealings.Many businesses must comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and many others to maintain a searchable email archive.
These requirements are not like those of old, where companies were told to comply but nobody checked. The regulators regard these as essential, and do allegedly check companies at random to ensure they are archiving email properly.
Legal Issues
An effective policy of archiving email is useful for the companies themselves. Having a coherent, compliant record of communications between companies and individuals could become invaluable during any legal proceedings. In the event of a lawsuit, the availability of supporting evidence in email form can make or break a case.
Reference
The longer you’re in business, the more data you will generate. That’s especially true for email. The more we send, the more we have to store. There are many reasons we may want to look at old emails, and archiving email gives you the means to do it.
Having an organized, indexed email archive allows companies to search and reference on email data quickly and efficiently.
Knowledge
We send huge amounts of data via email every day. They will include orders, quotes, gossip and occasionally useful information. We share knowledge like never before, often by email. So, similar to reference, knowledge is the ability to retain information in usable form.
Archiving email means any useful information sent via the medium is never lost. It may need searching for, but it’s always there. In a knowledge economy, that’s worth real money to any business.
Storage Costs
While disk drives may be cheaper than ever, they still cost money. If you have a hosted email archive, that translates into a higher monthly fee. Archiving email in an organized way, instead of just taking backups means you use less space, and can store more.
Archiving email also allows for secure storage of essential information. Should a disaster befall the building, or a virus wipe out the IT infrastructure, an email archive can replace much of the data that was lost.
While many small businesses are too busy staying afloat to worry about adding to their financial burden, the actual cost of archiving email is much lower than the cost of not archiving email. Even ignoring the penalties for not being compliant, the loss of important data, or spending money on storage you don’t need also costs.