How Cloud Email Backup Safeguards Email and Prevents Data Loss

Emails are a business tool that has been vital in the digital transformation journey of companies worldwide. Email is at the heart of internal and external communications, with essential and often sensitive information transmitted and stored using email. Even imagining a scenario without email would strike fear in many businesses. Organizations feel massive repercussions when a critical infrastructure fails or is unavailable because of downtime, emails are accidentally deleted, or there is an attack by cybercriminals. Email lost due to such events can result in companies losing business, suffering reputational damage, or being fined for non-compliance with various regulatory laws.

Cloud email backup is a solution that helps to alleviate an email disaster and meet regulatory compliance. In addition, cloud email archive solutions provide a mechanism to recover emails when the originals have been lost or destroyed.

Why Is Cloud Email Backup Needed?

Disruptions to emails can seriously impact a modern business relying on emails for business continuity, communication with customers, and internal comms. Cloud email backup offers correction if email-related problems occur. 

The three vulnerable areas below demonstrate how email disruption can impact a business:

1. Insider error and malicious email deletion.
2. Insider threats are a top cause of exposed or lost information. Accidental user errors, such as email deletion, can cause significant problems for companies that need to audit emails or trace or refer to communications. Malicious email deletion also happens. In 2021, lawyers in Elliott Greenleaf law firm stole emails and data to help startup a rival firm. The insiders then double-erased all their email communications to hide evidence of wrongdoing. 
3. Cloud email backup solutions provide insurance and peace of mind against accidental or malicious deletion or corruption of email.

Cyber-attack

Email systems are often vulnerable to cyber-attacks, as a 2021 attack on Microsoft Exchange by state-sponsored hackers demonstrated. The attack affected 30,000 companies and gave attackers full access to emails. 

An advanced cloud email backup system, such as ArcTitan, provides fast access and recovery of emails when data has been lost to accidental or malicious deletion, corruption, or cybercrime.

Regulatory Compliance 

Emails contain data that is both proprietary and sensitive. As such, email-held data is regulated under a variety of laws. Some of the laws that apply to email data include:

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): personal data (including those found in emails) must be able to be restored promptly in the event of an incident.

Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA): firms must retain, supervise, and retrieve business communications from personal and work-related devices.

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): HIPAA security states that covered entities must securely back up exact copies of electronically protected health information (PHI) and must be able to “restore any loss of data.”

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX): all public trading companies must keep business records, including electronic communications such as emails, for at least five years.

Lost and unrecoverable emails will place a company into regulatory non-compliance and put the company at risk of hefty fines.

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.

What Is Cloud Email Backup?

A cloud email backup system automatically creates a backup copy of an email and stores it securely. Cloud-based email backup is a centrally controlled and configurable software tool that continuously and automatically makes and stores copies of corporate emails. The result is a repository of your organization’s emails that are kept safe, secure, and readily accessible. In addition, cloud email backup services provide simple interfaces to allow the retrieval of emails if a disaster occurs. This business continuity helps to ensure that an organization can continue to work, even when cyber-attacks make email inboxes inaccessible. 

How Does Cloud Email Backup Work?

A cloud email backup system is connected to the organization’s email servers. The cloud email backup service duplicates emails, attachments, and calendar events, compresses them, and removes any duplicate material; the cloud email backup tool then archives the material on a separate dedicated server. Cloud backup systems like ArcTitan support existing emails and legacy PST files to create a single, searchable repository. 

Cloud email backup systems have a cloud-based interface that provides eDiscovery functions and makes email and attachment search fast.

Security is an integral part of a cloud email backup system. Security must include the following:

Encryption: emails must be encrypted during transfer to the repository using TLS (Transport Layer Security Protocol). TLS prevents any nefarious interception of email traffic. Emails must also be encrypted when in storage.

Access Control: Single Sign On (SSO) and granular, role-based access control.

Robust Authentication: passwords must be hashed and encrypted. Active Directory access controls should be available for ease of use and role-based policy control. 

It's painless to use ArcTitan to store emails.

Egil Bjorkedal, Head of IT at Saga Welco AS

Benefits Of A Cloud Email Backup System

Cloud-based email backup is essential for maintaining security, accessibility, and business continuity. The benefits of a cloud-based email backup service include the following:

• Peace Of Mind: knowing that your entire email catalog and associated attachments are always available, no matter what disaster occurs in your organization, provides peace of mind.
• Disaster Recovery: plays an integral part in disaster recovery and business continuity, access to emails, even during a disaster, can help a business to continue to operate.
• Data Loss Prevention: protection against data loss, such as email deletion and corruption.
• Accessibility: email is still accessible even if the originals are held captive by ransomware.
• Adhere to Regulations: cloud email backup systems ensure compliance with various laws and regulations.
• Saves Money: prevents financial losses due to inaccessible emails and lost customer information.
• Insurance Against System Failure.
• Easy Email Retrieval: cloud email backups are easy to use, make searches simple, and are available from anywhere.

ArcTitan Cloud Email Backup Solution

ArcTitan provides a comprehensive set of features to provide all the functionality needed when choosing a cloud email backup solution. ArcTitan has helped organizations feel safe knowing their email data is secure and accessible by backing up over 11 billion emails worldwide. 

ArcTitan is cloud-based, providing elastic scalability, and adjusts organically as your email repository needs change. ArcTitan is deeply integrated into Office 365, making the email backup process seamless. Subsequent retrieval of emails is simple and fast. The powerful search tool behind ArcTitan has a load performance of more than 200 emails per second, giving instantaneous results. The entire email backup process, from email backup to retrieval, is fast, simple, and reliable.

Essential features offered by ArcTitan to backup emails include:

• Affordable: ArcTitan can be deployed on a “pay as you go” or subscription basis.
• Ultimate Scalability: there are zero user numbers or storage space limits.
• Elastic Scalability: ArcTitan Cloud expands dynamically in storage capacity as your email data grows over time. 
• No Hardware: No onsite hardware is needed.
• No Manual Install: ArcTitan is managed and controlled from a central cloud console.
• Open Standards-Based: data is stored, transferred, and retrieved using open standards.
• Existing Data Support: Support import of existing email archive data from MS Exchange, Google Apps, EML, MBOX, MSG, or PST.
• Exceptional Support Included. 
• Deep Integration Into Office 365: ArcTitan integrates with Office 365 to make email backup seamless.
• Platform Agnostic: cloud-based, so ArcTitan is platform independent. 
• Automation: automated inbox management for ease of use and minimal employee training.
• Easy Mail Retrieval: Email is retrievable anytime from anywhere; ideal for remote and flexible working.
• Superior Audit Trail: ArcTitan keeps a secure, real-time copy of every email received by the mail server; the audit trail is tamper-evident, providing evidential-quality data that can be used to help in out-of-court settlements.
• Adheres To Robust Data Privacy And Security Standards: all ArcTitan data centers are IL5 certified and highly secure. ArcTitan encrypts emails during transport and in storage and enforces robust authentication and access control measures.
• Cost-effective: ArcTitan saves on costs as it reduces email storage needs by 80%. Also, ArcTitan users see routine maintenance programs run up to 50% faster.

Email is essential to the smooth communications of an organization, but email is not infallible. Accidental, malicious, and system failings all place email at risk. Cloud email backup is an essential business tool that keeps your company running. The best cloud email backup tools will save you money, give your organization peace of mind, and be intuitive and fast.

To see how cloud email backup can give you peace of mind, sign up for a free demo of ArcTitan.