60% of business-critical information is stored in emails. In addition, lots of organizations need to comply with regulations, compliance, and legal requirements. We have compiled this checklist to help you decide if your organization would benefit by having an email archiving strategy. An email archiving solution is important to protect and retain emails long term. If compliance is important to your organization, you need to give serious consideration to third-party email archiving solutions that work with your current email system.
MailMeter is a separate repository for your eDiscovery outside of your email tenant. If your workforce works in a remote environment, this is particularly important. Now you need to decide whether to use Google Vault or a third-party solution such as MailMeter. Google Vault isn’t standard with Gmail. You need a valid Vault license.
Organizations that use the standard Google Workspace need to buy monthly Vault licenses for every employee whose emails need to be archived. MailMeter is a cost-effective add-on to your current Gmail subscription. No expensive compliance add-ons are necessary. MailMeter works with EVERY license, so you only pay for the license you need.
Best practice suggests that archiving policy decision-making should occur at a corporate level or by an administrator. Best practice also suggests that organizations should archive all incoming and outgoing emails. The decision on which emails to archive and which to delete should not end up in the hands of individual employees.
Google Vault only archives emails from Google Workspace. Emails located in other cloud services, on-premises email servers, or local PCs/laptops, is archived to Vault when migrated to Workspace. Using MailMeter with Gmail provides a safety blanket as it creates a copy of your data. .As users can access this copy during the migration process they have access to their historical mail. MailMeter improves Gmail by giving you an archive that the entire company can search through. It also restores emails to a mailbox rather than creating untrustworthy .pst files.
Loss of data if users or licenses deleted
If an employee’s account or Vault license is deleted, their data is irrevocably removed from the archive after 20 days max. MailMeter retains the user’s data after they have left the company.
Platform dependency
The email client and the archive created by Vault use the same platform. If, for technical reasons the platform is unavailable, access to the archive won’t be available. As MailMeter is a separate platform email will still be accessible.
Google Vault stores archived data in the cloud, no on-premises solution is available. MailMeter offers both cloud and on-premises solutions.
Self-service for users
Google Vault is for administrators and auditors. The end users cannot access the stored data. This means most employees will need to contact the IT department or an administrator each time they need to run a search query. MailMeter allows users to search independently.
Compliance
Due to the limited functionality of Google Vault, organizations run the risk of not being able to comply with current rules and regulations. In highly regulated sectors such as finance, healthcare, law, or education, this could increase the risk of fines or other sanctions. The costs involved in hiring external consultants in the event of an eDiscovery case can be significant. eDiscovery requests can cost an organization $/€/£1000’s and can often require the need to hire outsourced firms or paralegals to do the searches. MailMeter includes access to our expert eDiscovery consultants for assistance with complex searches and providing best practices.
MailMeter uses an advanced search interface that provides extremely fast response times, enabling quick and easy responses to legal discovery requests. Everyone can use it immediately. End users, legal, governance, and IT departments to efficiently preserve, collect, search, and prove data management. There is no requirement for expensive training and additional resources to perform eDiscovery and litigation requests.
Rule 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) of the United States of America requires companies to retain all information stored in electronic form (ESI). This includes any information and files contained in emails. In the event of litigation, potential evidence must be accessible quickly and simply.
Protection against data loss
Whether by accident, error, or trying to cover their tracks, if an employee deletes emails, problems can arise. If a user deletes the entire contents of a mailbox on leaving the company are particularly serious. MailMeter captures an absolute copy of all emails sent and receive. Journaling and Historical Capture helps ensure full message capture for compliance and eDiscovery purposes–even if an end-user deletes or alters a message, the original, unaltered copy remains in the archive. All emails are single instances, digitally stamped, encrypted, providing proof that the email was not edited or tampered with.
Reduction in IT costs
Email archiving can help cut the cost of managing emails including the associated IT effort involved (e.g., users submitting specific requests to have emails restored from backups or email servers). Storage requirements and mailbox sizes are reduced significantly.
Archiving solutions reduces your IT department’s workload. It also helps reduce storage costs. It can protect your organization against the financial risk of data loss or legal breaches.
Increase in productivity
If your organization can access its entire email archive quickly and comprehensively it should help productivity. It makes sense to have self-service functionality built into the archiving solution so that users can access the archive, locate emails, and restore messages by themselves.
If you can use Google, you can use MailMeter