Organizations contend with a staggering volume of email. This year, worldwide email traffic will amount to 247 billion messages per day, according to the Radicati Group. The total worldwide volume of email traffic will reach 507 billion messages per day by 2013, according to the market researcher.
Small businesses rely on email for a range of activities. Preserving important transactions and documents — quotes, contracts, and customer correspondence to name a few — embedded in that mass of email is a growing concern for companies of all sizes.
That’s where email archiving comes in. This solution stores and indexes email so administrators can search for individual messages. The archiving solution integrates with an organization’s email server.
Benefits
The presence of a central email store provides a backstop when messages go missing. IT administrators, or a designated user, can locate and retrieve email when users inadvertently delete messages from their inboxes. But there’s another key benefit: the ability to preserve email to meet regulatory requirements or discovery requests during litigation.
Recent state and federal laws highlight the need for records retention. For example, Sarbanes-Oxley, which applies to public companies and accounting firms, calls for the retention of relevant financial documents including those in electronic format. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), regulations governing civil law suits, also put companies on retention alert.
Amendments to FRCP, make “electronically stored information” subject to the discovery process. The amendments apply to federal courts, but a number of states are including e-discovery language in their rules of civil procedure. DiscoveryResource.org provides a summary.
Implementation Approaches
Small businesses taking the email archiving route have a couple of options. They can purchase software, for one. Ferris Research portrays a large and growing market for packaged archiving software. The company expects the sector to reach $650 million in revenue this year and estimates that the market will expand at about a 20 percent annual clip through 2012.
In some solutions, the archiving software ships pre-installed in a specialty hardware device. Such products are termed appliances.
Small businesses should also consider the expected arrival later this year of Microsoft Exchange 2010. The email server includes a personal archiving feature, which some customers may find sufficient for their email retention chores. Small businesses looking for elaborate e-discovery features, however, may still prefer a third-party product. In addition, some third-party solutions archive files — word processing documents and PDFs, for example — as well as email, an all-in-one approach that small businesses may find attractive.
Finally, a hosted email archiving solution offers an alternative for customers who would rather not run an in-house system. In this case, the small business transfers email to a service provider through a virtual private network link. The service provider then stores the incoming email on its archiving server.
The choice for a small business boils down to the level of control they want to have over the archiving solution. The buyer must also determine whether the upfront licensing costs of an in-house solution or the ongoing monthly fees of a hosted solution makes more economic sense.
For further research, the 4sysops Windows systems administration blog keeps a list of email archiving software providers. CMS Watch, which evaluates content-oriented technologies, offers a listing of what the company views as significant software and software-as-a-service players.