What do you do with all the emails that are choking your inbox and your email server? Delete them? But what if you need them tomorrow, or next week, or next year?
It’s so easy to send an email – just type a quick message and hit ‘send’ – that our inboxes receive a flood of messages every day.
And it’s getting worse.
The email mountain is growing
According to market research firm The Radicati Group Inc, the 725-million email accounts that each generated around 110 messages a day in 2010, are expected to swell to 950-million email accounts generating 119 messages a day in 2014.
It’s therefore not surprising that businesses of all sizes are struggling to cope with the growing mountain of emails they send and receive daily, particularly as compliance and knowledge management issues require businesses to keep most of these emails received and sent.
The problem is that few businesses have the ability to keep storing them. The result is that emails that are regarded as non-essential are often deleted. That’s when ‘Murphy’s First Law of Cyber Correspondence’ kicks in: the email you delete today will be the email you need tomorrow.
In an attempt to reduce the load on their email servers, many businesses resort to compressing emails; but this can make it difficult to locate and decipher them at a later date.
Archiving your emails in the Cloud
The proactive alternative is an email archiving solution which is designed to take care of the great email keep/delete, store/retrieve dilemma.
However, on-premises-based e-mail archiving solutions can be difficult and expensive to implement and maintain.
Demand is therefore growing for Cloud-based email archiving.
While there are many different kinds of Cloud-based email archiving solutions available, it’s important to choose one that allows you to access every email sent or received quickly and without the need for technical support.
In addition, Cloud email archiving solutions offer more than mere storage – they offer secure storage. From a compliance perspective, it’s essential that all stored messages are encrypted and tamper proof, so that they can provide evidential quality data where necessary.
Keep your emails for 10 years
Emails should also be kept for an appropriate length of time. At MWEB Business, we believe this should be at least 10 years.
However, Cloud-based email archiving can become expensive if the service provider bases its fees on the volume of data stored. Rather, you should opt for a service that charges by the number of users. This enables you to know exactly how much the service will cost every month.
Does your company have a strategy in place for dealing with email or is it down to the individual employee to come up with their own plan? Tell us in the comments section below…