Experts have predicted that by 2026, there will be an estimated 392.5 billion emails sent daily. Email remains the backbone of business communications, meaning that huge volumes of critical information are passing through your email systems all the time. Effective management of these assets is important to ensure that you have access to the data that you need and that you are operating in accordance with compliance frameworks.
Anyone looking to store emails long term will need to ensure that storage is secure, cost effective, and easily accessible. To be sure that important email correspondence and data is preserved, a good approach to take is to adopt a combination of on-premises and cloud-based solutions alongside email archiving and secure backup tools, to ensure reliability and longevity.
Why Might Email Storage Be Needed?
Proper email storage is essential for preserving important communications. Whether it be for smoother business operations, easier legal discovery, or better data protection, having a reliable email storage strategy is a great way to ensure accessibility, security, and compliance over time. Some specific benefits of making safe email storage a priority include:
- Compliance: This involves adhering to legal, industry-specific, and regulatory requirements to retain email communications, which may include HIPAA, GDPR, or SEC regulations.
- E-discovery: This is the process of identifying, retrieving, and presenting emails that have been kept safely stored, typically as evidence in investigations, audits, or legal cases.
- Recovering email in the event of a loss: This refers to the ability to restore deleted, corrupted, or inaccessible emails. It is essential for preventing data loss caused by accidental deletions, hardware failures, cyberattacks, or system crashes.
By managing emails and storge effectively, organizations can ensure audit readiness and communication accountability, resulting in increased levels of customer and industry trust.
Email Backup Vs. Email Archiving
Despite the similarities between them, email backup and email archiving serve distinct purposes. Consequently, they differ considerably in their approach to protecting business communications.
Email Backup is the process of creating copies of emails that can be retrieved in the event of an accidental deletion, cyberattack, system failure, or data corruption. Email backup solutions will capture snapshots of emails periodically and store them safely in a secure location, either in the cloud or on-premises.
These backups can be restored whenever there is a data loss event, meaning business continuity experiences minimal disruption. Email backups are primarily for short term protection and disaster recovery.
Email Archiving, on the other hand, is a long-term storage solution. This option is designed to preserve emails in a tamper-proof, well-structured format for the purposes of compliance, as well as legal and business record keeping purposes.
Email archiving can be part of the compliance requirements for industries that handle sensitive data particularly healthcare and financial services. An archiving solution will index emails to make them searchable and easy to retrieve and can also apply retention policies to make sure that emails are stored for the required periods of time. Organizations can set access controls on their archives, ensuring only certain personnel can access certain mailboxes.
While both solutions providing data protection, the functionality, storage methods, and retrieval processes are quite different. Where email backup offers speedy recovery in the case of data loss, email archiving provides structured, long-term storage for compliance and legal requirements. Many organizations make use of both together, leveraging backup for disaster recovery and archiving for regulatory and historical record-keeping.
Options For Email Storage
On-premises storage
- Storing all email in-house allows organizations to take full ownership over their data
- Organizations will need to maintain their own infrastructure, but this also comes with the advantage of not being reliant on any third parties to keep backups or archives operational
Cloud storage
- This is typically achieved by working with a third-party SaaS vendor, who will ensure that backups or archives are maintained
- It can provide better ease of use for organizations, while eliminating the need to put together their own systems for backup and archiving
Viable Strategies For Long-Term Email Storage
Set retention policies
- Long-term email storage solutions need to stand the test of time, storing data for years rather than just a few months, as compliance frameworks stipulate.
- A retention policy determines how long stored email should be kept for before being deleted. Keeping all emails forever may not be a viable option if storage space is a concern. Establishing a data retention policy can balance this with ensuring relevant emails are available.
- Many solutions also allow for setting up legal holds, which can be used to retain messages indefinitely if needed.
Ensure data is both secure and accessible
- Even if emails are stored on the most secure infrastructure possible, that becomes useless if there’s no longer any way to read or restore the information
- Stored emails should be encrypted both at rest and in transit
The following are more article from Expert Insights related to email storage:
- Top Email Archiving Solutions for Business
- Why Is Email Archiving Important? 5 Key Benefits Of Email Archiving
- Top Email Archiving Solutions For Microsoft 365
- Top Microsoft 365 (Office 365) Backup And Recovery Solutions
- Top Backup And Recovery Solutions For Google Workspace
- Top SaaS Backup Solutions
