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Email Archiving and Business Continuity Planning

In the event of a disaster, every business must keep company operations running and recover quickly from the event. This is known as business continuity.

Ask yourself the following questions!

How much of your organisations business-critical data is kept in digital form? Data can be kept on premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid format.

Would your employees be able to continue to access essential data and continue to deliver key products and services during an emergency?

What is a business continuity plan (BCP)

Business continuity planning is where approaches are outlined to prevent disruption to or failure of a company’s business capability or, in an emergency, to get business up and running again as quickly as possible. These strategies need constant review as IT systems and processes are continually changing.

By having a business continuity plan and discovery plan working in together, it will be your insurance policy against the damage of an emergency.

Why might hardware or software systems fail?

While most businesses want to avoid disaster, problems will always occur. There are a multitude of reasons why hardware or software systems might fail. From the simplicity of a human error to natural disasters to the deliberate manipulation of data. Manipulation of data can take many forms also, intentional deletion of data by employees, cyber-attacks (phishing, ransomware, malware) from outside your organisation. Also, business operations can be halted if the infrastructure of the cloud provider goes down. For example your email system going down like Office 365 has done recently. Click here for the top 8 pitfalls of Office 365 email archiving.  

The Importance of Uninterrupted Access to Email and Data.

Email downtime can be very expensive, it will involve the loss of employee productivity as well as the loss of business opportunities.  Email is the most common form of company communication and having reliable access to email determines business continuity. Today, most organisations have employees working across the world remotely, in multiple time zones, who need access to crucial information and communications. Companies that rely on email to conduct their business must have continuous access to maintain their daily operations.

How does email archiving help?

Email as well as File Archiving software can enable your employee to continue to access their essential data and continue to deliver key services and/or products during an emergency. This makes Email and File archiving a crucial component of any Business continuity plan. In larger organisations it can be difficult to monitor emails your employees are deleting which can contain crucial data and leave you in breach of data compliance regulations.

Email Archiving automatically saves all your companies email data; this allows a business to safeguard its business-critical information in archived emails without the need to sacrifice server speeds.

Email archiving is also essential in the event of litigation, or a records or eDiscovery request being made, if a business fails to produce this information, it can be fined or even prosecuted. Even if you’ve previously kept your email data – using legal holds or downloading .pst files – in the event of a disaster or systems failure, without an email archiving solution in place, that data could be lost. By having email archiving as part of your organisations business continuity planning software in place can your business meet data compliance requirements and be properly prepared for an emergency or disruption to the business.

Email Archiving v’s Back up

A backup and an archive are used for completely different purposes and are quite different in several ways. Below, is a quick summary of the key differences between a backup and an archive and the critical common features which are important in both. You can find out more detailed info here- Email Archiving versus Data Back Up

  • Backup is for recovery from hardware failure or recent data corruption or loss
  • Archiving is for space management, compliance, risk aversion and long-term retention

Depending on what backup solutions you already have in place, email archiving can speed up the process whenever your data needs to be restored. This is because the archived data takes up less space.

The Importance of Continuity in the Time of Remote Working

When workers are spread out it is even more important to know where all your vital data is stored securely and accessible in the event of an emergency. Working remotely means that colleagues spend more time communicating digitally via email and so mailboxes will have seen an increase in traffic. However, with increase of email traffic comes an increase of risks of breaches or attacks. It is therefore important to understand how online solutions such as email archiving can help in an email attack. Not only can this be costly to your business but also to your reputation.

If you re looking to add email archiving to your business continuity planning. Waterford Technologies has the solution for you. Our cloud and on premise-based email archiving solutions can ensure that your employees have access to their business-critical data even in the event of an emergency. Your Businesses can carry on as usual and rest assured that sensitive information is being protected. Our email archiving solution MailMeter can be implemented into any current email system such as Office 365 and G-Suite.

Our experts are ready to talk to you one on one to suggest archival best practices, to help you manage email storage and discovery better, learn how to make use of all the archived business email for business intelligence and stay ready for regulation compliance.