For most organizations, email is the most significant driver of growing storage requirements. To combat this explosive growth, organizations typically enforce a mailbox quota on employees but these tactics tend to increase email management overhead and force end users to circumvent the process and create PST or NSF files. This shifts the storage pain to shared network drives, laptops, and external hard drives — and introduces data loss, corruption, and backup challenges.
Email archiving is an automated process for preserving and protecting all inbound and outbound email messages (as well as attachments and metadata) so they can be accessed at a later date should the need arise. The benefits of email archiving include the recovery of lost or accidentally deleted emails, accelerated audit response, preservation of the intellectual property contained in business email and its attachments and “eDiscovery” in the case of litigation or internal investigations (what happened when, who said what).
Email archiving solutions capture email content either directly from the email server itself (journaling) or during message transit. The email archive can then be stored on magnetic tape, disk arrays, or now more often than not, in the cloud. Regardless of the location of the email archive, it gets indexed in order to speed future searches, and most archive vendors provide a search UI to simplify query construction.
As enterprise data grows on storage resources, it can quickly exhaust terabytes or more of expensive storage space. Storage spent on infrequently accessed data not only consumes precious data center resources, but it costs time and money to manage and maintain.
File Archiving solutions address infrequently accessed data by providing an automated and integrated solution for archiving file content, thereby adding governance to file environments, lowering overall storage costs, and enabling eDiscovery of file content.
