Email Archiving -15 Essential Benefits for Various Businesses

Worried about your business’ upkeep and systematic growth? Or are you losing track of all the important emails coming to your business every single day? Well, maybe you should try email archiving before it’s too late.

Keep reading, and find out how archiving your emails can significantly give your business a major impetus.

What is email archiving?

It is a methodical process of organizing emails and storing them in an accessible location on the cloud. The point of archiving all business emails is to centralize access to those emails that one doesn’t need immediately. As well as keep them organized for future usage.

The technology helps to store copies of each email separately with accessible tags, like keywords, contact names, dates, or even sizes. One can sort the emails manually or automatically based on the nature of the requirement. The beauty of this technology is that even if your company data gets hacked and wiped, you’ll still have access to all your emails. 

Why do businesses require email storage and archiving?

After all, an average business receives and sends around 3000-4000 emails daily, which amounts to millions and billions Big Data. It is absurd to keep all of them stored in the inbox. At the same time, emails contain the most crucial business information to run an organization smoothly. Therefore, systematic storage is required for such a massive amount of data.

This is where the archiving process plays a major role. Not only does this process keep the inbox clean, but it also reduces the amount of storage required, maintains business transparency, and keeps things in order. 

As we know, the process has multiple benefits for businesses worldwide, we shall discuss some of the amazing benefits of email archiving:

1. Prevents the loss of important data

   

   Businesses have become a lot more sensitive about data because data sells. Data is now considered to be the exact selling point for any organization. Given this scenario, having a well-ordered stack of emails dating back 5-10 years, all stored and categorized with relevant tags, sound too good to be true. 

   You can keep all your critical data safe and accessible for use at any time by archiving emails.

2. Preserving data for long-term

   

   Reduce your dependency on the IT guys to retrieve an email you have deleted by chance. Archiving of emails has got your back!

   Preserve any email or attachment, customer-related information, SLAs, invoices sent through emails, WOs/POs (word order/purchase orders), sales tickets, and anything long-term.

3. Complying with data-related mandates

   

   Apart from IT sectors, industries like finance, healthcare, insurance, and legal firms - have stringent policies to store all the case histories for any future reference. Hence, storing large number of emails becomes mandatory for them. 

   Moreover, the GDPR regulations have mandated that certain data be stored indefinitely. In such cases, storing emails in an archive becomes crucial.

4. To facilitate a smooth eDiscovery process

   

   Lawsuits are part and parcel of any business organization running for a long time. No matter how we dread them, business litigation will be there. 

   During such unforeseen occurrences, “eDiscovery”, or digital investigation is imminent. Emails being critical corporate records, a business owner has to present all email histories as major legal evidence. 

   Keeping the emails categorized and stored in a safe place facilitates easy access, as well as prevents any evidence tampering. Hence, for a hassle-free eDiscovery process, an archiving solution is much needed.

5. Makes your data backup more robust

   

   Archiving makes the backup procedure all the more full-proof, with no scope for missing any data.  Just backing up your data can result in losing the original version whenever new information gets backed up.

   With a proper archiving facility, one can save, restore, and retrieve any version of data from anywhere, anytime, thus protecting every single communication and attachment.

6. Facilitates seamless remote and hybrid work process

   

   It is obvious now that the pandemic has removed the geographical barrier to working and has transformed how the world used to work. Working remotely, as well as with a hybrid workforce, have become the norm. 

   Companies must provide email access to both remote and onsite employees in order to keep up with this recent corporate trend. Archiving emails facilitates a smooth remote work process without any loss of data.

7. Full-proof disaster-ready solution

   

   Digital archiving services save important emails from getting corrupted in unfortunate incidents like the hard drive or the SMPS getting crashed, your laptop being stolen, or when the server is down suddenly. 

   To prepare for such dire times beforehand, it is better to archive all company emails securely.

8. Monitoring the information

   

   Sometimes, more than what is necessary gets leaked in emails. For instance, information related to payroll, acquisition, lead conversion, revenue, etc., are not the kind of data one would want to get leaked. This is another reason why we need email archiving- to monitor the nature of information getting passed on.

   Also, supervision over emails can prevent any misconduct, workplace harassment, POSH issues, cyber-stalking, etc. Thus, the archival method is crucial for corporate sectors, educational institutes, market research, analysis firms, etc.

9. Makes .pst files easily accessible

   

   Outlook data files, or .pst files, are most vulnerable to data loss or corruption, which can majorly affect the storage and search functionality, making the Outlook data inaccessible. 

   With a proper archiving system, one can import all the .pst files into the centralized system.

10. Safeguards intellectual property

    

    It goes without saying that every email is intellectual property and must be preserved; any loss or misplacement of the same is never accepted or wanted. Moreover, most service-oriented B2B companies utilize emails to transfer their deliverables. Therefore ,these IPs need to be safeguarded at all costs. 

    Archiving solutions protect the emails even if any accidental deletion happens due to human error.

11. Saves up storage space

    

    A great benefit of this email categorization approach is that it reduces the requirement for greater storage without compromising the user experience. Advanced email archiving solutions compress emails along with all the attachments to an optimum file size before archiving them. This size compression saves almost 50% of the storage space.

    Archiving software also leverages another technology, known as the “Data De-duplication” that eliminates redundant data. In simple terms, it saves one version or copy of each email, saving up the storage.

12. Boosts server performance

    

    The more you clear emails from a live server, the higher the performance will be. Often we face low server performance issues, and 70% of the time, it is because of a large number of emails and attachments with heavy file sizes.

    Moving these emails out and keeping them archived is a brilliant idea to enhance your server and its overall performance.

13. Improves business intelligence

    

    Archiving makes it possible to find crucial data in no time with just a few clicks. This all the more helps the sales and marketing people to collate customer data and utilize them to create marketing strategies, personalized newsletters, emailers, and so on, enhancing customer experience. 

    Eventually, this data can help the management spot the best-performing employee based on customer feedback.

14. Eliminates mailbox quotas

    

    Usually, mailboxes have a defined quota that, when fulfilled, needs either to be renewed or old emails eliminated. Archiving facilities help to tackle this, thereby keeping the quota in check.

15. Search and navigation become easier

    

    With appropriate search tags and keywords, like address, time, file size, nickname, attachment file name, and more, finding a specific email happens instantly. This brings down a lot of unwanted time that goes into searching for emails frantically. 

    Therefore, employee productivity increases, accuracy gets a major spike, and business operations stay in order.

Finding the right solution

There you go, five associated benefits businesses can reap by storing all their emails. Well, that brings us down to the final question, how to find the right solution! On the internet, you shall come across several service providers offering end-to-end storing functionality; you may also find many SaaS-based software. 

However, among so many, which one should you implement in your business operations? While selecting your best pick, thoroughly research the solutions to ensure the best value for your investment. 

Check whether your chosen option will give you peace of mind with high security and reliability. Only with an informed choice can you take control of the billions of emails your company gets drowned in.

Conclusion

Now that you know all the fantastic and practical uses of email archiving, think of the qualities you should be looking for in an archiving service for your organization.

Being aware of the benefits will help a business person to go for the right email archiving service provider that provides a comprehensive solution with high-end digital conversion services at a nominal rate. If you have yet to implement it within your operations, you might be losing a lot of opportunities. 

Start early, get your emails in place, and take better control of your business!