Businesses of all sizes use e-mail and instant messaging (IM) for critical communications, yet many overlook the importance of archiving electronic documents. In fact, recent studies suggest that less than half of all companies keep "e-records," despite regulatory requirements and legal concerns.
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Data retention regulations in health care, financial services and other industries affect businesses no matter what their size. Then there are more sweeping regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires public companies to save a copy of each e-mail that’s sent for a certain period of time.
For a small business, being able to produce e-mails or instant messages documenting how the company responded to a consumer or negotiated a business deal could save thousands of dollars in a lawsuit.
Archiving is a systematic way to save and protect electronic communications on unalterable media. It’s different from your regular e-mail backups, because the company sets policies on who should be archiving, how long communications have to be saved, and how they will be stored, as opposed to leaving it up to each employee to manage his own archives.
All saved messages are managed by an e-mail and IM archiving system and saved in a secure location. Unlike backups, an archive is searchable, allowing messages to be retrieved in a matter of minutes.
From a management point of view being able to search e-records across the entire company can make message retrieval a breeze. Say you were looking for a copy of a client contract that went missing. Odds are that contract is saved in an e-mail sent to that particular client.
There are technical benefits as well, especially for smaller firms that have limited storage space. Archiving systems save all your e-records in a dedicated and secure location, freeing up space on your regular in-house server and helping you avoid the server slowdown that can come with regular e-mail backups.
