Cloud based email archiving solutions are mechanisms hosted in the cloud for copying email data and storing the copies in a secure email archive to ensure data integrity and allow search and retrieval at any time. Having lower maintenance overheads than other email archiving solutions, cloud based email archiving solutions are often easy to use mechanisms that can be configured to centralize a company´s email database and improve email management.
The centralization of a company´s email database into an email archive makes it quicker and easier for users to recover accidentally deleted emails themselves. Each user can be give access to their own email archive, but not those of other workers. While they can access and restore emails from their email archive, they are not permitted to delete emails from the archive. This increases the productivity of IT departments, who can focus on more important issues than recovering lost, misfiled or deleted emails. Apart from Microsoft Office 365 and Exchange cloud based email archiving solutions, most solutions are compatible with the majority of operating systems and leading email service providers.
What is the Difference Between and Email Archive and an Email Backup?
There are important differences between an email archive and an email backup. Both can be used for disaster recovery, but an email backup is used for short term storage of email, whereas an email archive is for long term email storage.
Email backups are used to restore entire mailboxes in the event of data corruption. They are not ideal for restoring individual messages as backups cannot easily be searched. An email archive on the other hand has emails indexed before being sent to the email archive for long term storage. When emails need to be recovered from an email archive, a search can be performed, and emails can be found and recovered quickly.
Hardware vs Software vs Hybrid vs Cloud Based Archiving Solutions
Cloud based archiving solutions compare favorably with other options for archiving emails as they expand in size as the company´s need for capacity grows. Hardware and software solutions – and consequently hybrid solutions combining hardware or software – have limits on how much data they can maintain. When these limits are reached, companies have to buy more storage space, reassign space on other servers (which can affect performance), or migrate data.
The other options for archiving email also have issues with compliance. Companies must retain data to comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and those in regulated industries are required to have disaster recovery plans. Data can be destroyed and recovery plans impractical if hardware is lost, stolen or damaged, or if software is corrupted due to a malware infection or system failure. Cloud based email archiving solutions do not have these issues, as the email archive is continuously backed up and virus-scanned.
Cloud Based Email Archiving Solutions for GDPR
The need for rapidly expanding capacity could become an issue for businesses that collect, process or store the personal data of EU citizens following the enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This regulation applies to all businesses and organizations that do business with EU citizens – regardless of their location inside or outside the EU – and stipulates measures have to be taken to prevent the unauthorized destruction, loss or alteration of personal data in a similar way to HIPAA.
As the regulation also stipulates individual citizens have the right to request access to their personal data – and that data access requests must be resolved within thirty days – cloud based email archiving solutions are a more appropriate way to store personal data than backed up email databases. Businesses can quickly search the email archive and export the requested data with the click of a mouse, or delete the data if the customer’s “Right to be Forgotten” is exercised.
Not All Cloud Based Email Archiving Solutions are Identical
Although cloud based email archiving solutions have the ability to expand capacity as required, they are not identical in how they operate. For example, some cloud email archiving solutions archive email data periodically rather than in real time. This can cause issues with compliance, as the opportunity exists to amend or delete emails before the archiving solution has had the chance to copy them. It can cause issues if a company needs to produce email data for an eDiscovery request or to resolve HR issues and they cannot prove the emails have not been altered prior to archiving.
The sequence of events during email archiving also have an impact on the effectiveness of cloud based email archiving solutions. Ideally any cloud email archiving solution should remove duplicated data before the archiving process begins. The deduplication of email data reduces capacity requirements, accelerates searches, reduces the number of search results, prevents search results exceeding the maximum allowed, and makes navigation of the results much easier.
Cloud Based Solutions Eliminate the Threat from Email Database Ransomware Attacks
The threat from ransomware has grown significantly in recent years, and email databases are often encrypted in these attacks. If a hacker gains access to the email database, they can steal the data and encrypt the database. A ransom demand is then issued for the keys to unlock the encrypted database. Even if the data is encrypted to comply with industry security and privacy regulations – and is therefore of no use to the hackers – companies will be unable to operate effectively without access to their emails.
Cloud based email archiving solutions with real time archiving eliminate the threat from ransomware attacks on the email database by enabling companies to restore their emails and attachments from the email archive with the click of a mouse. Although network administrators have the option to restore archived emails by date, by user, or by tag, the deduplication of email data accelerates restoration of the database. Similar benefits apply if a company needs to recover from the malicious actions of a departing employee. Cloud email archiving is therefore important for data loss prevention and ensures business continuity.
ArcTitan´s Cloud Based Email Archiving Solutions from SpamTitan
ArcTitan Cloud is a cloud based email archiving solution capable of archiving up to 200 emails per second in real time. Email data is deduplicated, compressed and indexed before being encrypted and sent to Replicated Persistent Storage in an IL5 certified data center via a secure connection.
ArcTitan has recently been moved to a brand new cloud email archiving system, with the service delivered as a highly available, self-healing horizontally scaled Kubernetes cluster. Within that cluster are many different components working in harmony together, but independently. Should any component go down, that component can be taken offline and repaired with no impact on the others, ensuring a much more reliable service with minimal or no disruption during an outage.
Due to the advanced nature of the archiving process, ArcTitan Cloud can conduct a search over a database of 30 million emails in less than a second and retrieve data securely and export to a variety of formats.
Compliant with all industry security and privacy regulations, ArcTitan Cloud has tamper-evident audit functionality and a granular delegation feature that enables access permission tiers to be set by department, user-group or individual user. ArcTitan´s cloud based email archiving solutions do not use proprietary formats, eliminating the need for costly or time-consuming data conversions prior to being able to transfer existing archived data to a new email archive provider.
If your company is appraising the relative merits of cloud email archiving solutions, we invite you to take advantage of a free demonstration of ArcTitan Cloud. Our free demonstration gives your company the opportunity to see the ease of use of our email archiving solution, with no obligation to proceed with a subscription once the free demonstration has finished.
- ArcTitan acts as as a “black box flight recorder” for email.
- Cloud based email archiving solutions centralize email databases and improve email management.
- Authorized users can quickly and simply recover accidentally deleted emails – reducing the demand on IT departments.
- ArcTitan cloud email archiving sends emails to the archive in real-time in order to avoid compliance issues.
- Allows you to eliminate mailbox limits and PST files.
- The deduplication of email data reduces capacity requirements, accelerates searches, and makes navigation of the results easier.
- ArcTitan eliminates the threat from email database ransoms by enabling businesses to restore emails with the click of a mouse.
- Licenses are for active users only – You will not continue to be charged for mailboxes when employees leave the company, but can maintain their email archive at no cost.
- To find out more about our free demo of ArcTitan Cloud, do not hesitate to contact us.
