Why Archive?

The first thoughts in many minds are the legal implications. It is true that government agencies, such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory organizations, have established requirements for message retention, accessibility, and security. This isn't the only reason you should archive your mail. The reasons below are just a couple of examples of why you need to archive your email.

• Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Important business or customer information
• Storage management
• Legal or evidential requirements

Offsite storage of all of your business communications is an essential part of any disaster recovery plan. If anything happens to your building, services or storage hardware you may never retrieve your information. A hosted archive solution negates this risk completely.

Emails contain important business information. Not only from customers, but possibly internal policy or guideline information that may be needed in the future. Emails provide good reference material for everyday business activity, but the storage requirements for these grows at an alarming rate.

When email was first introduced, a mailbox size of 10Mb was thought more than adequate for the average user. Now the average Exchange mailbox measures several hundred megabytes.

Storage Management is essential to keep your users mailboxes a sensible size. It also ensures your mail server performance doesn't get mired in mailbox management. The more time your mail server spends managing user's mailboxes the less time it has to process mail.

Legal or evidential reasons are pretty straightforward. If you business gets involved in any kind of legal proceedings, email can serve an important role as evidence. Having a secure record of all email transactions can make all the difference in this kind of situation.

These are just a few reasons to join Archive Compliance!