Email is (arguably) the most critical communications life line for businesses. Between quick little notes to in-depth discussions, email is being used for more types or correspondence than ever before. And with that, there is more of a necessity to refer back or retain old email for archival or record-keeping purposes. There is also regulatory requirements in many industries to retain email messages for a certain amount of years. Thankfully, the solutions for email retention are out there – we’ll help you find the right one for your business.
There are a variety of ways email retention can be setup. We’ll touch on a few of them here.
- Cloud Retention Service: This is the solution that we have as an optional part of WestonBlock, our email protection service. In this kind of solution, you setup your mail server (either in-house service or outsourced service like Office365) to route all incoming and outgoing mail through the retention servers. A copy of all those messages are saved on their servers for a year or more, depending on the plan purchased, and are available via a Web interface. Microsoft also offers its own cloud-based retention service that plugs into Exchange 2010 and 2013 to enable cloud-based storage and archiving.
- In-house Email Server Retention Service: Whether you use in-house email powered by Exchange or an outsourced service like Office365, those services can also be setup with different retention policies to store data. Exchange can be setup with retention tags and policies. Office 365 has more advanced archival built into their Office 365 E3 plans and can be added on to some other plans (call us for details).
- Hardware-based Solutions: The other option is to put in-place a hardware solution. This would be a purpose-built server that would be installed for the sole purpose of email archiving. The up-front costs for these types of devices can generally be fairly high, and are primarily targeted at larger environments. We typically recommend one of the above two options instead so you don’t have the large capital expense.
Interested in discussing more about email archiving, protection, and services? Contact Weston Technology Solutions today to discuss your options.