email-archiving

Unfailing Performance Reveals Business Perseverance

Tue, 10 May 2011 09:33:29 +0100

Today the world is completely consumed by technology and its multi-faceted advantages. Technology has provided us the opportunity to accomplish feats that were considered impossible few years back. With the advent of the internet, technology has made our lives easier and comfortable. Doing business with the push of a button on the keyboard was an unthinkable notion. But now life will cease to exist without the internet.

Internet has helped ecommerce to flourish. Online businesses have scored outstanding results. Contracts and business dealings have all become a simple task without the hassle of coordinating and scheduling physical meetings. Your wish to communicate with your partners, customers, suppliers or vendors can be fulfilled through emails. All important business documents can be easily transported from the sender to the receiver within minutes through the internet.

Although communication and information exchange has become easy through the internet eliminating any extra costs, there are grave dangers lurking in the online world too. There is no dearth of criminals who know very well how to steal information illegally. Now this information could be confidential with details about the business, its clients, its strategies etc. Anyone can misuse this information and cause irreparable damage to the concerned business.

Data protection has become one of the most important issues in today’s competitive world. If you have a business that is doing very well and if you have unique ideas you can be assured that there will be countless rivals who will try to get hold of your critical information. Some have suffered massive losses due to lack of security measures while some have suffered due to their callous attitude. Companies are awakening to the dangers and effects of exposed and unsafe data and employing data protection solutions to stop the malicious attacks.

As competition is increasing businesses are facing challenges in increasing their profits while retaining their budgets. Technology has provided yet another channel to alleviate their burden. With the help of virtual servers businesses have encountered favorable experiences. A virtual server is a flexible option that has helped in reducing costs and improving the performance of the systems. However the threat of data being compromised is still high in virtual servers as these are not under your control.

If you have already started using the virtual servers or intend to use one in future ensure that you collaborate with a reliable vendor who can guarantee you robust and compelling data protection solutions with advanced features. Also they should have the facility to provide you with virtual server disaster recovery solutions in case of any natural or intentional calamities. If your business has the ability to recover immediately and function normally irrespective of any catastrophic circumstance then there is nothing to stop it from reaching its glorious heights.

Learn more about: email compliance and email archiving

Simple Guidelines for Email Compliance

Wed, 04 May 2011 07:12:42 +0100

Email is the prevailing form of communication within many organizations so it’s crucial to set rules for how it should be used. As some industries face stricter rules than others, the odds are quite high that your organization is subject to regulations on how to retain records. Regulations are something that just about any organization has to deal with. The real challenge, however, is to know which guidelines to adhere to and keep up to date as they are constantly changing. To meet government regulations and avoid the reality of non-compliance fines and penalties, email reviews are a necessity for many companies.

Many organizations have adopted the practice of reviewing emails for acceptable usage and policy enforcement. It is therefore necessary for email usage, security and communication polices to be airtight, easily understood and, most of all, enforceable. Below are a few simple guidelines for email compliance that will protect you from potential litigation and at the same time provide you with some user benefits.

Ensure that emails cannot be changed or deleted.

Encrypting and compressing emails will ensure that no alteration can be made. When retrieved from the compliance archive, a forensically sound copy can be produced in the email’s original format. This is especially critical in legal situations, as emails need to be the original format and not one that could have been tampered with or edited in any way.

Set rules regarding email usage.

As email is the quintessential communications tool in an organization, it is important to define a clear and transparent framework for behavior, setting down what’s acceptable and what isn’t when it comes to using email. The ability to audit its use and enforce its rules is a simple first step in demonstrating the intention to meet regulations and goes a long way toward avoiding liability.

Ensure that the whole email compliance process is audit-able.

In the email compliance email archiving solutions archive, it is necessary to maintain log files and counts as evidential proof. Log files must establish that no emails can circumvent the capturing of all emails. In such cases, all emails can then be searched for, found and viewed in their original format together with attachments.

The user should not have the responsibility of archiving emails.

By automating the entire process of email archiving, the user is not burdened by the decision making process of selecting the emails that are important. This way all archiving emails that have been sent or received either internally or externally, can be captured in their original format and archived in a secure manner.

Prevent data loss.

As the data held in systems contains valuable information, it must be guarded carefully against disclosure of confidential information within the organization. Most processes are covered by an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), as the security of your data can be unintentionally threatened by new employees or maliciously targeted by disgruntled employees.

Eradicate spam, phishing and malware.

It must be ensured that the email infrastructure is protected against malware, viruses, spyware and other threats to system and data integrity. A solution that can handle malware, spam, and denial of service attacks and harvesting of email addresses is required for this. External risk associated with data loss can be eliminated by blocking threats at the perimeter all the way through to the internal mail servers and desktops.

Email compliance is increasingly critical to the way businesses operate. It need not be costly, but ignoring email compliance now could result in expensive and time consuming costs in the future.

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Top Trends in Email Archiving for 2011

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:19:58 +0100

New laws and industry regulations continue to impact email communications, as do storage limitations and productivity concerns. This has resulted in IT messaging managers implementing email archiving solutions. Below are some of the top trends for email archiving in 2011.

Email archives to be accessed as unlimited mailboxes

Email archiving is a valuable tool for increasing end user productivity. Most users spend at least half an hour a day managing their inboxes when this time could be used instead for revenue enhancing activities. Many end users are demanding direct access to archived messages sans IT intervention. And therefore archiving solutions that empower users to restore lost mail, etc., are in high demand.

Stub free approach in mailbox management

Stubbing is a feature in archiving that strips an email of its attachment replaces it with a stub file or link within the message and then stores the actual message in an archive. This has been the typical way of managing email storage, and, over time, organizations faced other challenges like increased administrative overhead, added management complexities, etc. Many expect to see an increased adoption of stub-free approaches to mailbox management that help overcome these challenges in the coming year.

Integration of email archiving and continuity

Many companies are looking at a combined archiving and continuity solution, as there is an increase in demand for always-on email. Also organizations today have no tolerance for email downtime. The coming year will witness a large number of organizations looking at deploying archiving technology. This provides continuity capabilities, enabling the users to continue to receive messages even when the primary server is down.

Migration to cloud-based archiving solutions

Cloud based archiving market revenue is expected to deliver more than 50 percent of the total archiving revenue market in a few years. The growing trends of unlimited storage needs, stub-free storage management, continuity requirements and compatibility with cloud-based email platforms foresees that adoption of cloud-based archiving solutions will outpace demand for on-premise offerings.

Archiving access, anywhere and anytime

Current research indicates that mobility is the top priority for any organization, and this has resulted in many companies selecting archiving vendors who can provide users archiving access from their desktop, laptop or any mobile device. This trend will also lead more companies to evaluate cloud-based archiving solutions as end users cannot enjoy mobile access with on-premise archiving software deployments.

Enhanced scrutiny on security

The security of data stored outside the network poses considerable concern for companies that are evaluating cloud based archiving solutions. In the coming year there will be a larger emphasis on cloud archiving vendors to validate system security in the three core areas, namely physical security, technical security and administrative security.

Increased legal discovery workflow

Email a rchiving s olutions need to be fully integrated with legal discovery as nearly three out of four discovery orders require email to be produced as a part of the discovery process. 2011 will see companies turn to email archiving to help increase their agility in responding to pending litigation by enabling them to cull data and export search results for early case assessment—saving time and money.

Increased focus on social media archiving

The rise of social media usage, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, mean that an increasing number of organizations are assessing how they will preserve business-related social media interactions among employees. 2011 will see companies focusing more closely on implementing social media usage policies and automating enforcement by deploying a cloud-based social media archiving solution.

By analyzing future archiving trends, a company can provide insight into email usage and the patterns that cause waste. It can also determine the criteria that messaging managers should use to evaluate archiving solutions and decide on email archiving requirements.

You may also visit - exchange replication and email discovery

Email Compliance - Are You Ready for It?

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 08:30:08 +0100

Most business today is conducted by email, including sending important and sometimes confidential messages. According to Osterman Research, email contains approximately 75 percent of the information used by an organization’s individuals on a daily basis. With so much information going around the world every day, many companies often ignore regulatory compliance. Email compliance regulations and laws, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Gramm-Leach-Bliley, HIPAA and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures, have forced organizations to know more about the information stored in their systems than ever before. Email today contains a host of valuable and highly sensitive information that needs to be stored, retrieved and viewed on demand.

Conserving email has been made mandatory, thanks to the various regulatory compliance and legal risk management regulations that govern every country. It is top priority for IT managers today due to regulatory obligations and harsh penalties along with the prospect of enormous civil damages and even criminal prosecution. An email archiving solution is mission-critical to satisfying these obligations. Having regulations policies in place can save your company significant hassle and protect it from the financial implications of non-compliance.

This article provides simple steps to secure your email archiving system to meet compliance and protect yourself from potential litigation and at the same time provide you with some user benefits.

Email Management – There should clear cut guidelines and rules set with regards to the usage of email. There should be a check on the kinds of emails being sent and received, especially messages going out from the organization as they might contain information that should not leave the corporate walls or malicious information that could harm the receiver. Proper scanning mechanisms should be in place.
Secure Information Sharing – Security of information in the corporate system is very important. What you share with your partners or vendors needs to be secure as the information could be misused. Such messages should be properly encrypted so that no one else can have access to it. Keep track of who has access to what information. How centralized is the information? What format is it in? All this needs to be in order.
Educate Your Workforce – When it comes to compliance and security, it is best to educate your staff regarding email security and why it is important.
Centralized Decision Making – Users should not make important decisions pertaining to enterprise security. Important data should be handled centrally.
Evaluate and Improve Security Policies – Do you cut off physical and online access to your server once an employee resigns? Is personal information that you send over the internet encrypted? Is your online information secure?

The management of an organization is responsible for ensuring that emails are handled in compliance with applicable laws, regulations and frameworks of best practice. Non-compliance not only can lead to fines and criminal prosecution but can also ruin an organization’s reputation. Email encryption, together with content monitoring and control technology, can provide complete email compliance protection.

You may also take a look at - email archive solution and email backup

Retrieval Efficiency of Email Archival Systems

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 07:28:37 +0100

According to Judy Mottl, Internetnews.com, there will be triple the $1.7 billion market for email archiving technology by 2012. And, the surge is definitely due to the growing needs from enterprises of all sizes across the world.While so much is happening in the email archival scenario, the primary concern has always been retrieval speed/efficiency, security and privacy. Let us look at the first important issue, retrieval speed, in this article.

Retrieval speed of email archival systems is critical to ensure that companies have ready access to email records, whenever it is required. More importantly, since most of the companies use Microsoft Exchange server as their email server, email archival system should be able to manage exponential increase in the size of Microsoft Exchange servers.The following are the benefits that companies can realize when email archival systems have good retrieval efficiency.

Storage efficiency – Data management teams will now be able to reclaim terabytes of storage by moving old or infrequently accessed/used data from primary data stores to more cost-effective archival storage.
Online access - There will be improved information access by online users when the retrieval speed and efficiency is high. Data can be made readily accessible and reusable as well.
Backup - Users can enjoy high speed backup and recovery. Also, administrators can easily change data stores while taking backup.
Enhancing the overall process efficiency - Companies can save time and money and also, enable easy integration with other data management systems.
Regulatory compliance – This is one of primary benefits of an archival system which has excellent retrieval speed. Companies can expect to preserve important documents, e-mails, and other critical data according to internal rules and external regulations and still be able to produce evidence whenever required.

Going by the numerous operational and economical efficiencies that arise due to enhanced retrieval speed of email archiving systems, companies need to be careful while choosing email archiving software solutions. Most importantly, the software needs to support Exchange Server 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010. Additionally, email archiving solutions must also cater to reliable safeguards, including encryption in order to ensure that the email is tamper-proof and cannot be altered. It can also be determined if the solution has the ability to migrate all existing PST file data into the archive repository. This would enable organizations to eliminate PST files proliferation across the enterprise, thus resulting in better email management.

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Benefits of Virtualization in companies

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:28:32 +0100

Virtualization is being increasingly used by IT departments for server consolidation and testing purposes. Virtual servers are used to reduce operational costs and to improve system efficiency. The growth in virtual servers has created challenges for IT departments regarding high availability and data protection. It is not enough to protect physical servers but also take care of virtual server disaster recovery, as they contain business critical data and information. Virtual servers offer the flexibility, but at the same time if a single physical server containing multiple virtual servers fails, then impact of data loss is enormous.

Virtualization Benefits

Companies are adopting virtualization at a rapid speed because of the tremendous benefit it offers and some of them include:

Server Consolidation – Virtualization helps to consolidate multiple servers into one single physical server, thus offering improved operational performance.

Reduced Hardware Costs – As the number of physical servers goes down, the cost of servers and associated costs like IT infrastructure, space etc. will also decrease tremendously.

Improved Application Security – By having a separate application in each virtual machine, any vulnerability is segregated and it does not affect other applications.

Reduced Maintenance – Since virtual servers can easily be relocated and migrated, maintenance of hardware and software can be done with minimal downtime.

Enhanced Scalability – The ease with which virtual servers can be deployed will result in improved scalability of IT implementation.

Sonasoft provides a high-availability solution, protecting data that reside on virtual servers. Sonasoft’s application supports a myriad of email archiving, disaster recovery, backup scenarios. Customers can have multiple physical servers at the primary location and at the offsite disaster recovery location they can have one physical server with multiple virtual servers. Also, multiple virtual servers from the primary site can be easily backed up and replicated to the disaster recovery site.

In the case of Sonasoft, both on physical and virtual servers, the appropriate agents are installed and these agents have a very small footprint. Because of the limited footprint, the impact on these servers is minimal from a performance perspective. With other replication solutions, one has to install the entire application on the virtual servers and this will take a huge toll on performance.

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Top 4 Reasons Why You Need to Archive Email

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:27:56 +0100

Email remains the most prolific and most used communication tool across different business landscapes around the globe. Email has brought forth questions about the security of confidential office data as well as issues of the storage and archiving of important emails.

Email archiving system has thus become an indispensable part of any enterprise’s proper functioning. Forrester research analyst, Jo Maitland, in her report “Best Practices: Email Archiving,” states, “Smart companies use four key strategies to succeed with email archiving: They right size the infrastructure; walk through eDiscovery scenarios ahead of time; consider archiving other data types besides just email; and staff and manage the archive for the long term.” In the course of this article we shall focus on the most important reasons why enterprises need to focus on archiving emails.

Email has been transformed into an actual corporate memory for all its official correspondence. Over the years it has become an indication or proof of the enterprise’s activities and transactions. This further means that it has become a record of sorts and makes it critical for enterprises to understand that emails can represent a budding and intangible litigation risk. This is why it is in the benefit of an enterprise to opt for an optimized email archiving software.

Email records can be lost or even destroyed, especially in the case of a virus attack. Therefore the archiving of email is the only way important email communication can be protected and stored for future reference.

With the exponential growth of email, the actual size of email messages has also swelled. From the average email of around 1kb -3kb, it has now risen to a size of close to 5kb. From spreadsheets to word documents to graphics, attachments that accompany emails have also become important, and they too face the danger of being lost. Email archiving can definitely help in the easy storage of such documents.

A few enterprises rely on storing their email in multiple storage devices, like hard drives, tape drives, laser discs, etc. Yet this can only be a partial solution to the email storage issue because there can be issues of accessing information from multiple devices and with data loss as well. So while it is a good practice to archive email, it would be even better if enterprises employed an optimized email archiving solution that can be a one stop shop for all their email archiving issues.

Here’s hoping that the reasons mentioned above help to ensure that every enterprise owner takes email archiving seriously and invests in a software solution that can meet all their email archiving demands effectively.

You may also take a look at - exchange backup