What We Do

Email Archiving

Over the last few years, email has become an integral part of business providing organisations with an instant method of relaying business information. A recent study by the Gartner Group showed that organisations conducted 97% of their communications via email and for many organisations email is now accepted as written confirmation of approvals or orders.

What is “Email Archiving”?

An email archiving solution allows organisations to retain copies of all outgoing and incoming email traffic and also makes it possible for them to access the email content at any time from a centrally managed location. Messages received can be indexed and stored according to your specification.

Why you need to archive your emails

1. Compliance

Regulatory requirements is the major driver behind the increase in demand for email archiving solutions. Over 10,000 compliance regulations to do with email and how emails are stored and used has been enacted around the world.

Although regulation varies by industry, all records pertaining to the organisations business activity such as employee and client records, correspondences between organisations and financial documentation need to be retained.

The following EU & UK legislation warrant that organisations maintain their email records within a purpose built archiving system:

Data Protection Act 1988 – Principles 5 & 7 rule out all mail server platforms as effective means for storing personal data. Only a purpose built archiving system meet these requirements.

EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/FC - This directive stipulates that the data controller must implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal data against accidental or unlawful destruction or accidental loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure or access.

Financial Services Act 198 – financial organisations need to review their compliance with FSA guidelines in relation to email. Given the need to retain records for a number of years.

Freedom of Information Act - the act gives anyone the right to request from any public body for all the information they have on any subject they choose (Subject Access Requests).

UK Companies Act 1985 - every company must keep accounting records which sufficiently show and explain a company’s transactions.

2. Litigation Support

Nearly all businesses during their lifespan will become implicated in lawsuits. To support their defence or claim, an organisation may have to rely on email records. The validity of such support information may be questioned if the data has not been maintained under proper conditions. Litigation support information must be accurate, complete and where possible in its original state.

3. Storage Management

Many organisations will experience storage management growth (the growth in the size of the mail store where the emails are stored) of 25% per year. This means as storage quotas increase the mail store will struggle to keep up – this will have a knock on effect on users productivity. Apart from centralising your email records, an efficient archiving storage solution will store the emails in a compressed format, resulting in considerable disk space savings.

4. Knowledge Management

An organisations email systems can act as it’s corporate knowledge base as it contains vast quantities of useful email information which is often vital to a business and allowing access to this corporate asset can make their users more productive.

Some benefits of having an email archive solution includes:

Organisations are able to manage their email server resources more efficiently.

Allows for unlimited mailbox storage

Helps organisations comply with legal requirements

One central location for all emails and the search and retrieve function makes information easily accessible

Email archive solutions allow administrators to setup access restrictions which secure and protect intellectual property rights and ensures data integrity and confidentiality.

Staff time is used more productively. Time spent manually archiving and storing emails are significantly reduced.

To discuss your email archiving requirements please give us a call on 0800 001 5942 or email vip@supremesystems.co.uk