TechRepublic Resource Guide- Archiving and Storing E-mail

Overview

This article grapples with one of the hottest business and technology issues facing companies today: What do you do with all your data? One thing is certain: We're all under pressure to keep more data for longer periods of time, with greater consequences surrounding its entire life cycle. At each stage—from creation onward to retention and destruction—doing the correct thing with your corporate data is more important than ever.

As a result of the corporate accounting scandals of the last few years, new laws and the increased enforcement of old laws now require enterprises to re-evaluate their records-management policies.

E-mail records management has become a particular area of focus. Printing documents was the electronic records management solution for some enterprises, but with the growth in the volume of e-mail and instant messaging, enterprises need a new approach. Concurrently, the expanding size of e-mail system data stores presents operational challenges to IT organizations as they try to keep these systems running efficiently.

A new set of solutions has emerged to help solve these complex e-mail records management and e-mail system management issues. In their research, many industry analysts refer to this market area as "e-mail active archiving."

A good e-mail active archiving product provides a searchable archive of all e-mail messages for a defined period of time. It can often be used independently or as part of a corporate business record repository for legal and business management uses. It should also allow organizations to reduce the size of production e-mail data stores to gain significant operational efficiencies and related cost savings.