Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

By Emma Miller

The modern business landscape is evolving rapidly regardless of the industry or niche, with the competition becoming harsher by the day. This means that companies must find surefire ways to improve their workflows and cut costs as much as possible. In order to survive in the currently oversaturated market, businesses are often under a lot of stress induced by the “eat or be eaten” climate, especially in terms of optimizing both capital expenditures (CAPEX) as well as operating expenses (OPEX).

This dynamic environment acts as a catalyst for organizations to expand their infrastructure, purchase more software and hardware systems, as well as store heavy loads of data. Considering that email is perhaps the most deployed communication channel within most businesses, the email-based data is increasing on a daily basis, which requires the use of highly functional and long-term email archiving solutions that would help organizations optimize both their workflow and their storage costs, as well as solve the often convoluted regulatory compliance issues.

That said, here’s how email archiving can help your business do just that.

– Improved storage management

Email servers tend to be filled up with various emails and email-based data that accumulate over time, which can cause them to slow down and underperform. Rarely are employees regularly deleting the excess emails, causing a business’s storage management to be suboptimal.

Email archiving, which easily can be done with services such as Simplelists, solves this problem as it automates this entire process in a safe and streamlined manner. Even the deleted emails are being saved as copies for subsequent retrieval, while your servers are running smoothly with optimal free space.

– Taking care of the litigation processes & regulatory compliance

It doesn’t really matter which industry your business belongs to, your company is likely subject to state and federal regulations in terms of data storage and retention. On the other hand, litigation often requires that companies have some sort of email correspondence procurement system in place. These issues are best solved with proper data archiving and email retention policies that make sure your emails from several years back are easily obtainable, without having to pay more than necessary on storage.

– End-user oversight mitigation

Employees do not always tackle data management the right way. The amount of data that flows through your company is vast and email-based information comes in many shapes, types and sizes. Deciding which emails to delete and which to keep is not an easy task, especially when the main workflow is already overwhelming. These archiving tools help you automate this and avoid the deletion of essential company data.

– Improved IT productivity

Every IT admin knows how much work proper email management requires, and with their already too busy schedules and vast workloads, worrying about managing emails and their storage shouldn’t be on their task list. This can easily be prevented by using email tools such as those provided by Sekur, making more room for them to tackle more important, business-critical projects.

– Enabled eDiscovery

Certain aspects of the eDiscovery process and requests can be tedious, costly, and time-consuming, especially if a company hasn’t taken care of this type of compliance in a streamlined manner. This is obviated by email archiving as it enables you to boost email accessibility levels through tagging emails, commenting on specific emails, simple searches, etc.

– Tackling legal holds better

Legal holds allow companies to retain emails for longer than is required by the standard retention timeframe. Proper archiving and retention systems and policies enable your business to place a legal hold on any emails that pertain to litigation suits. Also, they allow you to track and capture (in real-time) any email messages related to current litigation.

– Improved disaster recovery

Company infrastructures and servers are not perfect systems with flawless security and disaster prevention. Data loss, especially if the destroyed data is critical for your business, can cause serious damage, both resource- and reputation-wise, which is why investing in its prevention is always a wise thing to do.

– Higher protection of intellectual property

Email-based data and metadata contain various types of sensitive information, even IPs. By using proper solutions for email data storing and archiving, you will mitigate the scenarios in which intellectual property is destroyed or stolen.

– Centralized administration email policy

The companies that have an internal code of conduct or policy against sharing sensitive information can also benefit from email archiving solutions as these also provide the means and tools to track and monitor employee emails and redact personal information from sensitive documents.

– Better auditing

By using these systems, your company is able to improve the auditing process by incorporating more systematic reviewing of emails and email data, providing you with better insight into particular activities and behaviors.

– Higher levels of business continuity

We already mentioned disaster events. To continue doing business when a major disaster event happens, a business must be able to access and retrieve key data and services. Emails contain a plethora of critical data pieces, so email archiving helps with this as well.

– Enhanced business intelligence

Proper data archiving allows companies to access pertinent information through simple searches. One of the key aspects of proper business analytics is having insight into employee performance and client behavior, enabling you to improve upon various aspects of the business intelligence process.

Closing words

Focusing on data accessibility and analytics in a transparent and secure manner is the only way to stay on the right track and actually beat your competitors. We strongly suggest that your company considers investing in email archiving tools that can help you automate one of the most tedious – and yet critical – aspects of your workflow. Email platforms are the most used communication networks of today, and protecting this data, while making it more accessible, is the key to streamlining email management.

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Emma Miller is a digital marketer and blogger from Sydney, Australia. After getting a marketing degree she started working with Australian startups on business and marketing development. Emma writes for many relevant, industry related online publications and does a job of an Executive Editor at Bizzmark blog and a guest lecturer at Melbourne University. Interested in marketing, startups and latest business trends.