Cloud Based Email Archiving

Email is critical to every business department, so it’s no surprise that large enterprise businesses often have millions of messages from outgoing and incoming communications. For compliance and backup reasons, these businesses need ways to store the potential terabytes of data stored on email servers. It’s not efficient to store backups on a production server, so businesses need a better solution.

Offloading email archiving to the cloud is the most cost-efficient, scalable, and convenient method. It might seem like on-site email archiving is more secure, but the cloud provides more cybersecurity and access control than building your own solution. Cloud email archiving is also more scalable, so managing storage capacity and adding to existing infrastructure is no longer a challenge.

Benefits of Cloud Email Archiving

Most organizations are aware of the many benefits associated with cloud computing, but they often hesitate to store sensitive data like email messages in the cloud. Email cybersecurity falls under many compliance regulation requirements, so archiving solutions must be carefully considered to avoid any violations. Here are a few ways email archiving in the cloud can help:

Reduced cost: Installing your own infrastructure and cybersecurity tools is expensive, but leveraging the cloud costs a fraction of what you pay for on-premises hosting.

Eliminate complexity: Most cloud providers have a centralized dashboard where administrators can provision storage resources without the challenge of installation and configuration.

Convenient storage: Along with ArcTitan, administrators can easily configure their storage solutions and customize it to fit business requirements and compliance regulations.

Lower capital investment: Buying on-premises equipment can cost six figures for most businesses, but the cloud requires a much smaller monthly fee with little-to-no upfront costs.

Better scalability: Instead of buying equipment when storage capacity is low, the cloud lets administrators quickly provision additional storage from a centralized dashboard, making additional storage capacity available in minutes.

Encryption services: Effective email archiving solutions like ArcTitan offer encryption capabilities to stay compliant and protect the organization from a data breach.

Availability: If your archiving solution goes down, then you can’t archive or review old messages until administrators fix the issue. With cloud solutions, your archives are always available from any office location around the globe.

Moving data to an archive can reduce storage usage by 50%, which makes it beneficial to big businesses that spend thousands on unnecessary storage usage.

Best Practices for Email Archiving in the Cloud

Having cloud solutions for backups and email archiving are beneficial for an organization, but you should still follow best practices to ensure that your data is secure and follows compliance requirements. Best practices will also ensure that recovery of email messages happens quickly, data isn’t corrupted or compromised, and data is protected from insider threats and external attackers.

Performance is always an issue with large data storage. It’s possible to have terabytes of data archived, so any email archiving solution should have a centralized dashboard where users can search for files and retrieve messages quickly. Search features should be fast and accurate to avoid interrupting user productivity and causing users unnecessary frustrations. Products offering email archiving should engineer solutions to provide various search function and indexing for quick search results.

A chain of custom from user to storage ensures that email messages haven’t been tampered with. Archived email messages are often used in investigations and legal proceedings, so a solution must offer a way for stakeholders to verify data quality and fidelity. Administrators can run reports showing investigators and law enforcement that messages are intact with an audit trail showing movement across the network and all access requests from users.

Email messages contain trade secrets, customer data, and intellectual property, so security of messages should be a priority. Security is often a concern for enterprises unfamiliar with cloud storage. The thought of storing data on the internet sounds like a security risk, but the cloud is more secure than housing data on-premises. The cloud offers advanced cybersecurity tools, and your email archiving solution should provide access controls, data encryption, and audit trails. Before choosing a cloud provider, ensure that it’s SSAE-16 SOC 2 Type II certified.

It's painless to use ArcTitan to store emails.

Egil Bjorkedal, Head of IT at Saga Welco AS

On-Premise vs. Cloud Email Archiving

Even with cloud benefits, some organizations still want to know the pros and cons of archiving email on-premises. Deployments for small or large businesses can be costly, but proper email archiving is more than just costs. Provisioning and deploying storage infrastructure is complex, takes several manhours to manage, and requires constant maintenance and upgrades.

A few ways cloud archiving is more beneficial than building a solution on-premises:

Fewer bugs: Building your own infrastructure requires constant testing and remediation of bugs, which can interfere with the entire archiving workflow and corrupt data.

Less hardware management: On-premises hardware must be constantly monitored and updated with the latest firmware patches. With cloud archiving, administrators no longer have the overhead associated with maintaining hardware.

Increased security: Administrators can take advantage of cybersecurity with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics for monitoring data protection in the cloud.

Monitoring out-of-the-box: On-premises monitoring solutions exist, but they must be installed separately from the infrastructure buildout. The cloud has monitoring solutions built into its features, so administrators can take advantage of the cloud’s capabilities immediately without finding a third-party solution.

Lower management costs: Not only are the costs much higher for building a solution in-house, but on-premises solutions have extensive costs to manage it including staff hours, third-party vendor software, troubleshooting, and loss of productivity during downtime.

Many large enterprises start with on-premises solutions and slowly migrate to hosting email archives in the cloud. Businesses without an archiving solution can get ahead of the curve and begin with cloud solutions and provisioning infrastructure to quickly back up email without the extensive overhead. The cloud eliminates many of the initial challenges, and migrating from an on-premises solution to the cloud can be a complex and delicate process.

Archiving Email with ArcTitan

Every feature necessary for effective email archiving in the cloud can be found in TitanHQs ArcTitan. ArcTitan is a fast, secure, and convenient email archiving solution that takes away the complexity of building your own solution and simplifies workflows. To get started, book a free ArcTitan demo and find out how we can help.