Continuity

A lot is made of an organizations legal obligations for email archiving.  Compliance with e-discovery, secure storage and protection from litigation.  Not so much seems to be said about business continuity.

As well as an organization may function day to day, you only really know how good you are when things go wrong.  Most business have some kind of business continuity plan that they implement when things do go awry.  It may be as simple as grabbing your accounts folder before running out the door to a complete corporate scale continuity site with secondary offices.

Whatever the scale of the plan, email archives should be a part of it.  The saying, 'You only know what you have when it's gone' is true, and especially so when it comes to email records.  Most companies do business via email.  Be it general communication and updates to contract propagation and discussions.  No business can afford to lose this kind of information.  Not only would it damage your bottom line, but your reputation and credibility in the marketplace.  Imagine the derision a possible new client would feel if you had to inform them you 'lost' all the communications you had with them in some disaster.

Even on-site archive systems may fall prey to some business disasters, especially if they involve a targeted effort, or a physical disaster like fire.  A SaaS email archive solution would be the only one hundred percent reliable solution in this situation.  In a SaaS situation (Software as a Service) all of the infrastructure necessary for your needs is hosted elsewhere at the vendors location.  It would be unaffected by any disaster that may befall your business.  The vendor would also have their own business continuity solution to protect them from occurrences too.

If your organizations infrastructure is damaged and out of commissions a SaaS solution would enable your business to continue a semblance of normality while things were rectified.  Most SaaS email archives will have web interfaces which will allow access to all of the systems and applications you had enabled.  At the very least you could communicate effectively until the organization was fully functional again.

In the modern business world, information is a commodity, and if you lose it, you will lose money.  Having a scalable and secure backup of all your communications and transactions is an essential tool for business.  Working without one and ignoring the risks is a false economy.  You may save money now, but it may cost you dearly later.

This kind of continuity plan should be considered by any IT or business manager who has responsibility for such things.  It is no longer the domain of multi-nationals with budgets in the hundreds of millions.  Archiving solutions, especially SaaS based ones are affordable and can scale to almost any size of business.  It will adapt and evolve as your needs change and the impact on the day to day running of the business is unaffected.  The extra systems are invisible to the end users and to the business as a whole until they need to retrieve something.  Only then will the true value of this kind of system be realized.