Why is Compliance Archiving Critical?

email archiving

For most businesses, email is a critical part of daily communication as well as workflow. Unfortunately, a good number of organizations do not understand how critical archiving emails within their systems is. Such organizations do not even have an email retention strategy in place. Furthermore, professionals in the financial and legal industries are not aware that they should archive their emails, and are unaware of what not having an archiving strategy can do to their businesses.

Email archiving solutions provided by companies like Erado are designed to store your business emails in their original forms for easy retrieval as you carry out your daily operations. The archive is typically in a secured cloud environment and works on a system that automatically extracts an email message with its contents and attachments from specific accounts. The contents are then stored and indexed in a read-only format where you can use advanced search tools for retrieval of specific documents and messages.

Why should you consider archiving your company’s emails? Here is a look at some of the critical reasons behind this idea.

To Comply with Statutory Regulations

Every sector has its own compliance regulations and standards that it requires players to adhere to when it comes to securing and retaining data. To be compliant, your company has to follow the process laid out by your industry’s regulatory body concerning how data is retained, including email messages. The data should be stored in such a way that you can easily access and retrieve it should you need to.

Some of the sectors that have particularly strict compliance regulations include energy, government, healthcare, and financial. An email archiving service can help your business meet these standards.

Improve Business Productivity

Any email archiving solution should be designed to offer you easy retrieval of specific messages. If, for example, an employee within your organization accidentally deletes a business-critical email, you can retrieve it fast via an email archive solution. Once you retrieve the email, metadata of your activity is created. This makes it easier for the software to sift through the data summary to locate the content you are looking for.

Protecting Intellectual Property

Depending on your organization’s size, older emails can be a huge information resource for your business. When you use email archives, you can leverage data analytics and insights generated in the past to boost your business today.

For instance, you can find records of email communication between a client and your sales team. This will enable you to measure response rates and resolve customer service issues among other things to improve how your sales team works. Such insights into your company’s intellectual property will help you make better decisions on what business processes require improvement.

Support Litigation

email archiving compliance

An email archive gives your business the critical protection and support required should you be involved in legal proceedings. This process, also known as litigation discovery, involves the retrieval and submission of data as requested. Without an email archive, retrieving the data for legal proceedings may be a nightmare that may damage your business.

In addition, you should also have access to information in case of a business investigation, compliance audit, or any other matter likely to occur. An email archive ensures that you have secure storage where your content will never be altered. The service also provides you with impeccable support for legal holds and early case assessment.

Organizational Memory Retention

Lastly, email archiving helps your business achieve continuity even after changing personnel. New employees can search your archive for critical information that they would have missed otherwise. Your new employees will also become familiar with your customers faster, providing them with better service.