Email conversations can be professional or just a bit of fun. Either way, it is information that comes out of your head, which means that you own it. Not just that, you may even suddenly find that you actually need it again, at which point you have to be able to find it somewhere among the thousands of emails you have sent. That is when you suddenly find you need email archive solutions.
These solutions are in place to make sure you are compliant with a range of different federal regulations. Those have been put in place to make sure businesses comply with e-discovery requests, and they have a legal obligation to be able to do that. But organizations have multiple employees, who all send hundreds of emails a day. So how is it possible to find anything in among all of that?
Why Are Email Archiving Strategies Needed?
Different regulations have put rules in place in terms of how long emails have to be stored. Consider, for instance, that you probably come into work on a Monday morning to around 200 unread messages, and you will start to understand the volume of this task. Yet, you have to keep all of those messages somehow because you could face some very serious penalties if you didn’t.
Some of the risks you run by not having email archiving solutions include:
- Hefty financial penalties.
- Imprisonment.
- Having to settle in lawsuits because you cannot provide the necessary information.
- Losing a lawsuit because you cannot evidence your point of view.
- Loss of intellectual property.
One of the worst offenses you can commit is destroying emails that do not go in your favor. This is classed as obstruction of justice and can lead to your imprisonment. Not just that, in a litigation, you will be presumed guilty for destroying the evidence.
When someone provides you with an e-discovery request, you only have a limited amount of time to present the evidence they have requested. This means that you have to have solutions in place that allow you to quickly and accurately retrieve information. Email archiving solutions can do this, and you even have three options to choose from. Those are:
- On-site solutions.
- Hosted solutions.
- Cloud solution.
There are a few things you need to consider to help you choose between these different solutions, including:
- Is the solution cost-effective? Generally speaking, having a solution on site is the most expensive, because it means you also have to run, operate, maintain, and update the service. Cloud storage is usually the cheapest.
- Is the solution reliable? If it is unstable, clunky, or regularly crashes, you still won’t be able to comply with e-discovery requests.
E-discovery and email archiving may sound complex, but it isn’t all that bad. Once you have the right solution in place for your needs, it basically runs itself. Just make sure you spend some time comparing the available options to get the right one.