Email accounts for over 90% of all business communications. These communications contain valuable business data such as contracts, purchase orders, invoices, presentations and so on. Because of the sensitivity and value of this content, companies have to comply with numerous regulations.
At the same time, companies are also facing other IT challenges due to the growth in messaging data. IT departments are struggling to meet ever-increasing storage requirements, while keeping their mail servers in optimum condition. The solution is simple: email archiving. But which tool should you choose? And what for?
In Switzerland, there are many reasons to implement an e-mail archiving solution. The main ones are: regulatory compliance, litigation cases, data preservation and intellectual property protection, mail server and storage optimization, mail server backup and disaster recovery
and finally monitoring the content of e-mail communications.
Although Microsoft has taken a good first step towards implementing archiving for Exchange Server, the giant needs to further refine its functionality in order to execute archiving properly. Control over some of the functionality lies with the end-user, which is a major flaw in the implementation of archiving from a regulatory point of view.
Users are responsible for managing their own archiving needs by moving e-mail from the main mailbox to the personal archive. However, it is up to the company to make decisions regarding archiving policy. Under no circumstances should end-users make decisions about which e-mails to archive and which to delete. Firstly, because users have to make discerning decisions for each e-mail, which takes time. Secondly, they risk deleting e-mails that should be saved. This defeats the purpose of archiving.
On Microsoft Exchange, users define their own retention rules. As messages move from the main mailbox to the personal archive, different rules may apply, such as moving messages after 90 days, moving messages to a subfolder of the personal archive after 180 days, or moving messages from a subfolder to deleted items after 180 days. Once again, when it comes to e-mail archiving, the company needs to draw up retention policies. Depending on government and industry regulations, a company must implement a company-wide retention policy. Not all users have the knowledge or understanding of the company's ever-changing regulatory requirements, and should not be tasked with deciding how long e-mails should be retained.
Microsoft Exchange was not designed for archiving. As a result, its ability to store large amounts of data and retrieve it quickly is quite limited. Using only single-instance, compression and deduplication technologies, Microsoft's archiving solution in no way minimizes or optimizes disk usage. The result? Your local disks are overloaded and you don't know where to store important e-mails.
As you may have gathered, Microsoft offers a wide range of powerful Microsoft 365 services, but a full backup of your 365 data is not one of them. By choosing a 365 backup solution from EVOK, you protect your Microsoft 365 from damage, enabling rapid recovery of deleted data.
With fast, efficient data recovery, users can easily restore their data. A copy of the data is saved locally on a NAS or USB hard drive.
Our solutions are scalable according to your needs, thanks to the use of data storage on Hitachi SAN clusters.
For even greater protection, EVOK online backup encrypts all data using AES 256-bit encryption technology, making your data unreadable throughout the backup process. Only you know the encryption key that makes your documents readable.
The primary objective of the archiving solution is to preserve e-mails. The gold standard for e-mail storage is that it must be court-approved. Thanks to 100% Swiss storage, we can guarantee you an e-mail archiving solution that will pass any industry audit and comply with all regulations.
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