5 common email archiving misconceptions

Every business relies on email for formal communication. Even with the many different modes of communication now available, email has withstood the onslaught of competition and is still widely used by businesses across all sectors and regions.

This reliance on email has led to an exponential increase in the amount of emails sent and received every day, and the kind of information shared is of utmost importance in the business context. Businesses exchange performance reports, revenue data, contracts, designs, and other important intellectual property over email.  

With the increased volume and sensitivity of data stored in emails, comes the burden of maintaining them safely and for long periods of time. Archiving emails in a secure environment can provide this much-needed security.

While many organizations have adopted email archiving, others have been hesitant because of certain misconceptions about the practice. In this article, we'll discuss five common email archiving misconceptions and debunk them.

What is email archiving?

Email archiving refers to the process of storing emails in a secure location for easy search and retrieval. To ensure extra security, emails are usually stored on a different server from the one where the organization's email provider is hosted. These emails and their attachments are preserved and indexed to allow for quick retrieval and export. A secure archive serves as a long-term retention plan and makes managing the volumes, retention periods, and legal investigations a much simpler process.

Why should you archive your emails?

Email archiving offers many benefits. Apart from the obvious, such as long-term email retention and secure secondary storage, there are many other reasons why archiving is a good idea.

• Archiving helps organizations with regulatory compliance. Because many global regulatory laws require that important data must be kept for specific periods of time, organizations must maintain an email archive of their communications.

• Instead of your organization's email administrator having to manage the retention duration for different employees manually, they can configure retention policies in the archiving service based on each employee's role and the company's requirements.

• Email archiving is a great way to manage incident response and disaster recovery. With a secure email archive, it's much easier to keep your business running even if a data breach strikes.

• When legal requirements arise and your organization is mandated to provide evidence in court, an email archiving solution with powerful eDiscovery capabilities can help find the right email among the abundant emails that your employees send and receive.

• Archiving solutions help with storage management on your email provider. With your emails safely archived, you can remove older emails from your email provider to make way for new ones without add-on storage purchases.

To read more about the benefits, click here to view our article on the benefits of email archiving.

Misconceptions about email archiving

Businesses have been archiving emails for decades. Even though archiving types have evolved, the need to archive emails remains constant. Organizations across the globe understand this need and are adopting email archiving solutions to keep their emails secure.

But there are many common misconceptions around archiving that prevent some organizations from archiving their emails. We'll delve into a few of these common misconceptions and the reality behind each of them.

Email backups are the same as archived emails

Many organizations think that email backups can act as an archive and fulfill the necessary requirements. In reality, email backup is much different from email archiving.

To start with, email backups are performed at regular intervals. This means that emails aren't backed up as they're sent or received. So, if a data breach or other disaster strikes between backups, the emails that were sent or received during that time won't be included, and the organization may risk permanent data loss.

Most companies use email backup for short-term data retention and for disaster recovery purposes. It doesn't help with storage management because it's reliable enough to maintain the email copy in the backup. Email backups aren't indexed and stored since their main goal isn't to help with email eDiscovery and retrieval.

All of these factors are addressed in email archiving solutions. The aim of an archiving solution is to retain data for a long duration and store it in a secure, searchable format. This ensures that the required emails, along with their attachments, are stored in the right format and can be retrieved whenever needed.

More importantly, archiving solutions help organizations comply with legal and regulatory requirements, which if not adhered to could mean heavy fines.

An email backup can't be a replacement for archiving solutions. Both serve unique purposes, and it's most effective if they're used together. For a detailed explanation of the differences between the two, check out our article on the differences between email archiving and email backup.

Email providers have archiving capabilities built in

Most of the major email providers, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, have email archiving capabilities built in. While these archival services provide basic archiving, they still have rudimentary functionalities.

Several essential features, such as searchability, indexing, long-term retention, and email encryption, may not be available in the email providers' archive. This creates the need for an archiving service that offers all of these functionalities.

Most email providers—even the most well-known ones—are prone to hacker attacks and other cyber threats. If your email account gets hacked and the threat actor either locks you out or deletes your emails, you need to have a secure copy of your emails archived. These can be retrieved and restored in your email provider later. So, it's best to keep your archiving service separate from your email provider.

Another drawback to maintaining your email archive in your email provider is the format in which the emails are stored. Regulatory compliance laws across the globe dictate that emails must be stored in a tamper-proof, easily retrievable format. Email archiving solutions provide tamper-proof storage for your emails, while this isn't guaranteed with email providers.

Other functions, such as creating investigations, email holds, eDiscovery, and email export, can also be achieved more efficiently with email archiving solutions.

Archiving is necessary only for regulated industries

Regulated industries are those that are mandated to adhere to the quality standards, protocols, and policies defined by the specific industry's regulatory bodies to ensure certain standards and set up processes. Many organizations believe that companies considered to be in regulated industries are the only ones that need to archive their emails. This is a prevalent misconception when it comes to email archiving.

Most regulatory bodies require that certain types of emails need to be archived for a specific duration. So while it's true that these industries have to archive their emails, this doesn't mean that other organizations don't have to use email archiving solutions. As we've already discussed, email archiving offers many other benefits apart from helping companies comply with industrial regulations.

Legal inquiries are common in business scenarios. If your organization gets caught up in a legal case, you might have to produce evidence in court as part of the investigation. Instead of going through the behemoth task of combing through emails in your email provider, you can search and retrieve the required emails within seconds using email archiving solutions. In these cases, archiving solutions come in handy not just for regulated industries but for all types of organizations.

Similarly, if an email breach strikes, the hacker could lock your employees out of their email accounts or even threaten to delete their data. If your emails are archived in a location other than your email provider, you don't have to worry about losing sensitive email data permanently. These are just a few of the reasons why email archiving doesn't have to be restricted to regulated industries alone.

Archiving has to be done on-premise

Emails can either be archived on-premise or on the cloud, or organizations can use a hybrid model to archive their emails.

On-premise email archive captures emails and stores them in an indexed physical database. On-premise archives are hardware servers that involve significant infrastructure to be set up and maintained periodically. Specialized technicians are needed to maintain and service the hardware. Many companies assume that if email archiving is done on-premise only, they'll stay secure and within the bounds of the organization.

In reality, many secure and robust cloud-based archiving services have popped up in the market. These archiving solutions help overcome the challenge posed by on-premise archiving. Cloud-based archiving solutions are scalable, and they offer a standard cost structure.

Certain security issues can be expected in on-premise solutions. One common issue is physical damage to the server hardware. In case of a disaster like fire or flooding, companies are at risk of losing their important data. So cloud-based email archiving is commonly preferred by companies these days, sometimes even over on-premise solutions.

Archiving puts my company at risk

Many organizations assume that archiving their emails causes security risks to their company. They mistakenly think that archiving solutions may not be secure enough, which puts their company's sensitive data at risk. But archiving solutions securely store emails in an encrypted format, guarding them from both external and internal threats.

Another common misconception seems to stem from the notion that archiving emails may make their company non-compliant with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, and others. Many compliance laws across the globe mandate that emails be deleted after their purpose is served. Companies fear that the archiving service might retain emails for longer than the period required for compliance.

However, in reality, most popular archiving solutions are compliant with industrial regulations and help organizations retain data in a format that helps with the organization's compliance mandates. They allow admins to set up multiple customizable retention policies for different kinds of emails.

With the right retention policy set up, organizations can ensure that emails are retained only for as long as they need. Without an admin's intervention, the emails will be removed from the archiving service based on the retention period that has been configured.

By retaining emails for the prescribed retention duration, admins can also ensure that they're better prepared to face any legal inquiries or data breaches that may come their way.

Email archiving with eProtect

eProtect is a cloud-based email archiving and security solution that provides cloud-based email archiving for cloud and on-premise email providers. The solution offers secure email archiving, quick eDiscovery, and export of data to ensure organizations stay compliant and are ready for all legal inquiries. eProtect is the archiving solution powering Zoho Mail, a platform trusted by millions of users.