Achieving email archiving compliance can be a challenge for businesses. A vast amount of data is stored in corporate email accounts, which is hardly surprising given that an average office worker receives around 120 emails a day and sends about 40. Some of those emails will be junk and can be safely deleted, but many are important business emails that need to be retained.
Depending on the industry and the country the business operates in, there will be one or more regulations covering the retention of business data, which includes data stored in email accounts. Regulations with data retention provisions include the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI DSS, FINRA, SEC, and many more. Under these regulations, and general business data retention requirements, different data types will have different retention periods, some of which are 12 months, with others requiring data retention for 3 years, 6 years, or even indefinitely.
Complying with these data retention requirements can be a major headache unless the decision is taken to store all email data to comply with the regulation with the longest data retention period. That strategy is likely to be costly, as the storage space required can be substantial. While creating backups of emails to meet compliance obligations is an option, it has the potential to cause major problems. Backing up and storing emails is checkbox compliance, where an action is taken to comply with regulations. With this approach, if a request is received from a regulator or legal order is received to produce specific email data, recovering that data may not be possible, as backups are not searchable. Further, backups do not include a tamper-proof copy of all emails, so it will not be possible to prove that the emails produced are in their original form.
The best solution is to opt for email archiving compliance. A business email archiving solution will streamline the retention of emails to meet compliance requirements and will ensure that emails can always be recovered whenever they are needed. Since email archives index emails, they allow searches to be performed on the archive, including senders, recipients, subject lines, message bodies, and attachments. When emails need to be recovered, a search of millions of messages across multiple locations and email accounts can be performed in minutes, or in seconds if searching small numbers of mailboxes.
Email archiving compliance is concerned with meeting email retention requirements with the minimum possible effort. Email archiving solutions for business can be programmed to automate the sending of emails to the archive and the deletion of emails when they are no longer required. Since individuals can search their own archives, IT teams will not have to deal will support tickets from employees who have performed over-enthusiastic inbox clearances and need to recover important emails. They can simply search their own archive and recover the messages they need.
An email archive can significantly reduce the burden on IT teams and, through automation of data email retention, businesses can ensure they meet compliance requirements while also reducing the potential for human error.
ArcTitan: Simplifying Email Archiving Compliance
TitanHQ has developed a cloud-based email archiving solution called ArcTitan to make email archiving compliance as simple as possible. ArcTitan is provided as a SaaS solution that can be quickly and easily deployed across an organization to automate the archiving and storage of business emails. ArcTitan allows administrators to easily set policies to meet compliance requirements, and automate that process and send inbound, external, and internal emails to their cloud-based archive.
ArcTitan has highly granular controls which allow administrators to set and enforce their email archiving policies for the organization, offices, departments, user groups, and individuals to comply with all industry regulations and to meet all of their legal obligations. The archives include tamper-proof copies of all messages, and lightning-fast searches can be performed on the archive using an intuitive web-based interface. Users can also perform searches of their own archives using an easy-to-use Outlook plugin.
As a SaaS solution, updates are applied automatically and will not add to the IT department’s patching burden. Archives are spread geographically in multiple data centers to ensure constant availability, and archives are backed up automatically to ensure email data is 100% protected.
ArcTitan is cost-effective for businesses of all sizes, with a transparent pricing policy, no hidden extras, you only pay for active mailboxes, and there are no limits on storage space. If for any reason you want to export your data, you can do so in all common data formats.
If you are new to email archiving, the TitanHQ team is on hand to answer your questions. For more information about using ArcTitan for email archiving compliance, or to book a product demonstration, contact the TitanHQ team today and take the first step toward minimizing compliance risk and securing your email data.