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Why Do You Need To Conduct An Email Audit?

Email has become mission critical to just about every business. While email is undoubtedly an incredibly powerful business tool, with the growth

Email has become mission critical to just about every business. While email is undoubtedly an incredibly powerful business tool, with the growth in its adoption and use comes a number of issues which need to be addressed and potential risk which need to be mitigated for.

This is why performing an email audit is so important for any organization using email. Just some of the benefits of performing regular email audits are outlined below.

Adherence to Acceptable Usage Policy

An Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP) is essential for every organization to ensure that end-users are using email in a professional and appropriate manner in line with your organization’s internal policies and external regulations.

As important as defining and implementing an AUP for your organization, is the process of actually ensuring that email users are complying with the policy. An AUP which cannot be measured and enforced is next to useless.

Conducting an email audit will allow you to quickly identify those individuals who are in violation of the organization’s AUP and potentially identify areas for improvement and refinement in the existing AUP.

Productivity and Costs

Conducting an email audit can allow you to calculate the actual overall cost of email to your business. This is the first step in identifying ways to reduce this cost and making email a more productive business toll for your organization.

An audit can give you an insight into how email is actually being used in your organization and allow you to measure the impact on costs and productivity of non-business related emails.

For example, is there a large volume of personal email, music files, or video clips being sent across your organization’s network? This could lead to your IT infrastructure being over-provisioned to accommodate non-work related activity.

The financial impact of this on your business can be significant. Your business may run into storage issues or simply pay too much for bandwidth to accommodate this activity.

Corporate Governance, Risk Management & Security

Depending on your industry, the unique makeup of your business and your area of activity, there may be a large number of corporate governance, industry regulations and legal requirements which you need to meet with regards to email.

Whether it is a Freedom of Information Request, an industry-specific regulation or even an audit or request from a potential client of supplier, being able to demonstrate compliance and having confidence in your ability to comply is essential.

The fact is that you cannot demonstrate compliance unless you can effectively measure, analyse and understand how email is being used within your business. An email audit is the best way to give you this insight.

For example, without conducting an email audit, can you be sure that your business is not being misrepresented by an employee or a single end-user is not in violation of some regulation with regard to personal data or trade secrets?

Proper Management and Best Practice

An email audit will allow you to identify whether you actually have full visibility of your email system. It is essential that you have a total view of all email being sent and received – both internally and externally.

Unless you conduct this process, you can never really be sure that your business is not exposed by the content of your email system – whether it is proprietary information being handled inappropriately or violations of company or industry regulations.

In addition, this process will give you insight into how email can be better managed and operated within the organization to reduce costs, increase productivity and better meet internal and external compliance policies and legal regulations.

Learn More About Conducting an Email Audit

Now that you know the importance of conducting an email audit, read our Key Features of an Email Audit blog post for some tips from the team at Waterford Technologies.

MailMeter from Waterford Technologies has a number of tools and features to help you conduct your next email audit.

For more information on how MailMeter can help your business meet its compliance and regulatory requirements and improve your use of email, get in touch with the team by clicking here.