Businesses of all sizes rely on email to communicate both internally and externally. Your business will likely send out hundreds of emails a week, if not more. As a result, archiving email is incredibly important. Email archiving is different to just backing up or keeping emails in the inbox. It involves storing your emails, either in the cloud or on-premise, in a secure environment, which can be easily searched and audited. This means the emails can’t be tampered with or deleted, but they can be searched and viewed.
Archiving email has many benefits for your business. Archiving helps you stay legally compliant by keeping a communications record. It can help in a legal case where you need some record of communication. It can help you recover data, manage your IP and increase productivity.
To help you find the right product, here’s Expert Insights’ list of the top Email Archiving platforms for businesses. We’ll discuss their features, the support they offer, and pricing.
ArcTitan is a comprehensive email archiving solution designed for use with Office 365 that allows users to easily and securely store and search emails. ArcTitan stores all archived emails in an encrypted and tamper-proof archive, ensuring they are protected against data-loss. ArcTitan provides powerful searching and e-Discovery, allowing emails in the archive to be searched in a matter of seconds and retrieved instantly when needed. ArcTitan is a strong archiving solution for organizations, offering automatic back-ups, cloud-based storage and easy data recovery, with cost-effective pricing.
ArcTitan provides full compliance with industry standards, including GDPR. Emails can be easily searched and retrieved, and are fully immutable when stored in the email archive. Pricing is flexible and based on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, and ArcTitan promises to help organizations save up to 75% on email storage space, reducing the costs and storage on mail servers. ArcTitan is simple to deploy and manage. Admins can configure the system from within the Outlook client, and easily edit retention policies and mailbox quotas. Searching the archive itself is also straightforward, with a search console that makes it easy to locate the right emails on both desktop and mobile.
ArcTitan provides a number of benefits over native archiving within Office 365, including enhanced email search and storage, reduced complexity and reduced time spent on deployment and ongoing management. Customers praise ArcTitan for its speed, scalability, and the fact the service has no storage limitations, helping to save on archiving costs. This also means that ArcTitan is a strong solution for organizations looking to store large amounts of email, such as schools and universities. ArcTitan is an easy to manage archiving solution, which we recommend to SMBs, enterprises and MSPs who are looking for comprehensive archiving available both on-premise and in the cloud.
Waterford Technologies’ MailMeter service is an email archiving and compliance solution that provides archiving, eDiscovery and storage management. With MailMeter, you can easily find and analyze past emails in seconds, with an accessible dashboard and granular searching options. This includes email content and attachments, with tagging options to make finding specific clusters of email easier. MailMeter is well suited for organizations that need to perform frequent email searches, with eDiscovery, analysis and export capabilities. MailMeter provides a number of archiving and compliance solutions, delivered in one comprehensive package which is easy to deploy and manage.
MailMeter is fully legally compliant, with eDiscovery, retention and legal hold features that ensure all emails are securely stored, searchable and tamper-proof. Users are able to search past emails in seconds, filtering by sender, message content, message tags (which can be customized), attachments and more. This search tool is available for both admins and end users and is easy to use without any additional training, allowing users to quickly find past emails that have been lost or accidentally deleted. Retention policies can be set for users, departments, key phrases within emails and attachments to help organizations easily meet their compliance obligations.
MailMeter is available both on-premise and in the cloud, and is a strong solution for archiving emails within Office 365. The service helps to reduce costs for O365 users, as it works with all licenses, rather than the more expensive E3 or E5 licenses which are typically required for archiving. It also helps to reduce complexity and data-loss when archiving within O365, due to the restricted retention policies natively offered by Microsoft. MailMeter also provides high-quality technical support, with responsive support teams dedicated to the US, Europe and the Middle East. MailMeter offer a strong archiving service, well suited to organizations of all sizes looking for a comprehensive archiving solution for compliance, public records and eDiscovery on email messages.
Libraesva offers a range of products designed to protect organizations against sophisticated email threats and ensure compliance. Their product suite includes a Secure Email Gateway, a security awareness training platform and next-gen email archiving. Libraesva Email Archiver is their archiving solution that protects business critical information against data loss while simplifying compliance and governance processes.
Libraesva Email Archiver creates copies of all user emails and stores them in a central archive to ensure the security of corporate data in the event of a breach or natural event resulting in data loss. To ensure security and compliance with data protection regulations, Libraesva timestamps each archived email and encrypts it via AES 256-bit encryption, protecting the data store against tampering. Organizations can choose whether to store their archived data on local disks, network disks or in object storage, with full S3 compatibility and support for on-premises virtual appliances. And no matter where data is stored, the Outlook Add-In features enables users to seamlessly access archived emails without having to log in to a separate portal.
Libraesva offers flexible cloud and on-prem deployment options and integrates with all mail servers, including Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange. This enables all organizations to utilize Libraesva’s email archiving platform, no matter their state of cloud migration. We recommend Libraesva Email Archiver to any sized organization looking to implement email archiving for security and compliance, and particularly those that may also wish to utilize Libraesva’s SEG and awareness training platform within their email security stack. We also recommend the solution to MSPs wanting to add email archiving to their product offering, as Libraesva offers native multi-tenant management.
Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive is a comprehensive email archiving platform for SMBs. This solution is delivered as part of Proodpoint’s Essentials package, a multi-layered email security and compliance stack which includes email protection, encryption, archiving and continuity, delivered as a single platform, with a single admin console.
Proofpoint have an unparalleled visibility into email threats with their global threat intelligence platform. Proofpoint collect and analyse more than 100 billion data points a day from more than 100 million email boxes, 200 million social-media accounts, and 7 million mobile apps. Proofpoint secure more than 50% of the Fortune 100, the top 5 banks globally and 7 of the top 10 global retailers.
Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive is highly secure, and offers quick performance when searching through email content, with configurable legal hold and retention policies. Emails are held for up to 10 years, with no limits on storage. End users are able to accesses their own archived emails, but not edit them, on desktop or mobile. In addition, admins can configure a range of retention policies to ensure legal compliance.
Proofpoint Essentials Email Archive is popular with customers for ease of use, and ease of deployment, in particular for O365 users. The service is cost-effective when considering the advanced features on offer. We recommend this service for SMBs and organizations of all sizes, particularly those looking to deploy email archiving alongside a leading inbound email security platform.
You can read our full review of Proofpoint Enterprise Archive here.
The Mimecast Cloud Archive platform offers a strong range of features to allow you to safely and securely store your emails. Mimecast stores all of a company’s communications in a highly secure vault. They store detailed data about the time of sending, where it was sent, and the device it was sent on. The archive is simple to use, and quick to return results. This is hugely important, as looking for large numbers of email can be very time consuming on a slower service.
The platform also creates reports which show who has accessed the archive and when. This can help your business stay compliant or support legal cases. They offer features which give users access to their own archive, which is useful for them to manage old clients.
Mimecast is a popular choice among clients, who highly praise the quick search times and ease of use of the archive, even on mobile. This is a market leading service, which is an ideal solution to your archiving needs.
You can read our full review of the Mimecast Cloud Archive here.
Global Relay’s Archive is ideal for larger businesses, who need to store all their communications in the cloud. Their service goes beyond just storing email. It can store instant messages, mobile communications and social media interactions. Each one contains meta-data about where it was sent and what times. One of their archives can store data for up to 400,000 users.
Global Relay guarantees customers full legal compliance, meaning that their archives are completely tamper proof. They offer flexible access to the archive based on your role within the organization. This can be useful if managers need to be able to access the archive, or someone in HR, but not everyone. The archive is easy to search, offering a multi-lingual interface and quick search times. In addition, Global Relay offers very specific email searches to help you find one particular email out of an archive of thousands.
One thing to be aware of is that leaving this service can be expensive, as you will need to export large amounts of emails. However, Global Relay is a great option for large business who need an easy to use and fully featured service.
You can read the full review we’ve published on Global Relay here.
Barracuda Cloud Archive (formally Barracuda Sonian) is leading email security vendor Barracuda’s enterprise archiving solution. The platform stores all emails, incoming and outgoing, as well as their attachments. Their archive is quick to search, and very secure. It segments all accounts within the archive, so even if one is hacked, the rest stay secure. The security of this service means that it’s popular with clients. They also like how easy the archive is to search, and how easy the service is to deploy. This service is also very cost effective.
This platform is well suited for companies looking to meet legal compliance regulations. For example, it’s very easy to export emails in bulk from the archive, and pass them on to a third party. It’s also impossible to tamper with emails, even when being exported. This makes Barracuda Cloud Archive an ideal platform for companies who need to ensure they are legally covered, such as those in the financial sector.
You can read our full review of Barracuda Cloud Archive here.
Microsoft offers a cloud-based archiving solution for businesses. Being part of O365 and Exchange, this product is easy to use and implement. This makes it a great option for smaller businesses who need to securely archive their emails, but don’t want to go through another third party vendor.
Microsoft Archiving is popular with customers for this reason, but also because the service is cost-effective. It’s very easy to add this option on to your current Exchange or O365 solution. This service also offers a good range of features. You can set retention tags, so you can choose specific emails to be archived. There is also built in auditing to show who is accessing the archive. Microsoft also offer unlimited data storage at no extra cost.
Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving is an ideal platform for smaller companies who need basic email archiving. It’s cost-effective and easy to use.
You can read Expert Insights’ full review of Microsoft here.
Barracuda Essentials is a bundle offered by Barracuda to small businesses. It includes an Email Secure Gateway and Email Encryption, as well as Archiving. This archive is cloud hosted with a focus on ease of use. It’s easy to search, offering quick search results and granular search times to help you find individual emails. Barracuda offer apps to end users, so they can access their archive even if they are off network or if Outlook is down. Barracuda offer good reports which show who has accessed the archive, and when. As a leading vendor, Barracuda offer a secure and dependable service. They have a good customer support team.
Barracuda offers a good service for small businesses, which is cost effective and bundled with a range of other features. It’s a good option for businesses looking for basic archiving alongside a range of other security products.
You can read the full review of Barracuda Essentials Archiving here.
Smarsh offer two levels of email archiving, one aimed at small companies, and one aimed at enterprises. It’s an expensive service. Smarsh is positioned for the most part at highly regulated financial companies who need to meet legal compliance. To meet their needs Smarsh offers a secure service, with a high service availability. End users get access to their archive, with identification so admins can tell when they have been reading old emails.
Smarsh offer premium customers the ability to archive instant messages such as Bloomberg or Slack. It has a fully featured user interface which makes it ideal for businesses who regularly need to access months old email communications.
Smarsh is a good option for companies that need the most advanced archiving available. We recommend this service to users who are able to take advantage of its granular controls and advanced features.
FAQs
What Is Email Archiving?
Email archiving solutions allow you to store tamper-proof, immutable copies of each and every email your organization sends and receives. These emails are stored separately to your main email client so that if you change company email systems, delete every email in your inbox or your company network is wiped, you’ll still have copies of all of your original emails.
Many email archives today are cloud-based, allowing you to access your stored emails from any device, at any time. They’ll often also include e-discovery features, which allow you to search the archive for specific emails by recipient, sender, time, attachments, subject and many more attributes.
Once you have found the emails you are looking for, or even if you need to bulk export every email from a particular month for example, archiving solutions make it easy to restore past emails and attachments. Most email archiving solutions will capture this email content directly from the email client itself, or during transport, so the entire process occurs without any added work for IT teams or end users.
