April 17, 2023
With 269 billion emails being sent and received daily and with circa 200 billion of those emails being SPAM, storing and archiving of those messages has become one of the basic tasks for digital businesses regardless of their size or niche. And this is not the case due to sheer volume of emails alone. These messages and sensitive information they often contain can be of critical importance for a company or a solopreneur in terms of potential legal issues with their clients, other entities, or for litigation and audit purposes.
This is why automating your email archiving system can be quite beneficial for solopreneurs and micro and small businesses (as they often don’t typically have the time to deal with these time-consuming and rather menial tasks), as well as for medium and large organisations (as this way they can cut costs and mitigate the need for having employees who would tackle this work). By incorporating email archiving solutions, your emails and the data they contain get archived, managed and preserved automatically.
Let’s delve a little deeper into some of the main benefits of using these systems.
Being in full compliance with all regulations and standards in terms of data retention and security can be tricky, especially as each industry has its own unique rules. In order to stay in compliance with these regulations, you should be following best practice processes in terms of data retention and security, which includes your email messages as well as their attachments that may carry some very sensitive and secret pieces of information.
This type of data should be segmented and stored in such a way that you can easily access and retrieve any desired email or attachment should the time for that type of action come. This is especially true for industry sectors like finance, government, healthcare, IT, and so on - as these businesses have to deal with tight compliance regulations.
Incorporating email archiving solutions helps you deal with these issues and make sure you meet all the necessary standards and data retrieval requirements. Especially if these documents need to be retrieved in their original forms and formats, which is almost always the case.
Quality archiving systems are by design user-friendly and highly functional when it comes to easy data/messages retrieval, especially in terms of individual emails and/or attachments. Both micro-businesses and large organisations are prone to human error and the scenarios in which someone accidentally loses emails containing critical data are not rare. By using email archiving, you can rest assured that all your emails can be quickly and easily retrieved, along with its metadata, making the task of filtering through your data and locating the messages you seek that much easier.
Emails, regardless of their age, often convey a cornucopia of data and intelligence describing your projects, tasks, finance and business secrets that you wouldn’t want to end up in the wrong hands.
You can also use this solution to access and analyse old data and project details so you can gain insight and potentially handy analytics-based pieces of information that you can use to tweak your strategies and improve your workflow.
Moreover, you can try to increase the productivity and response rates of your clients and/or team mates by analysing archived messages and communication channels across your projects and therefore potentially solve future workflow bottlenecks and improve overall communication.
Should you get involved in some legal-based proceedings, you must have litigation discovery in place as it provides your business with the necessary protection and support. Litigation discovery involves retrieving and submitting information upon request, which is where email archiving comes in handy because, without it, data retrieval for legal proceeding purposes can potentially be a pricy and arduous process, often more so than litigation itself.
Opting for an offsite archiving solution can help with your cost optimisation in terms of data retention and regular IT maintenance. Solopreneurs, entrepreneurs and large companies can benefit from using a third party email and/or data archiving solution that has a multi-tiered pricing.
As not all data is made (or in this case preserved) equal, these systems make sure that your archiving costs are optimised according to the relevance of data, as well as the speed of retrieval. Certain pieces of information and files do not have to be held highly accessible (which is often quite expensive ), and can instead be preserved via a much cheaper archiving plan.
Businesses of all shapes and sizes often have to tackle certain tasks and processes that feel like a waste of both time and resources. And although some of them ultimately prove to be unnecessary investments, taking care of proper archiving systems for your emails and the data they hold is highly recommended, as well as beneficial. Especially in the long run.
Bio: Damian is a business consultant and a freelance blogger from New York. He writes about the latest tech solutions and marketing insights. Follow him on Twitter for more articles.