When choosing an archiving solution, businesses have various options. The right solution will depend on business needs. For instance, consider whether the organization will need to archive email messages from multiple platforms. Additionally, consider regulatory requirements, as well as how much granular control the organization will need.

Two popular email archiving solutions include the Microsoft 365 Business Standard email archive and eGovernance archive. Each solution offers significant benefits for small businesses. Organizations should carefully evaluate their needs and budgets as they select the archiving solution most suited to their purposes.

Microsoft 365 Business Standard Email Archiving

Microsoft 365 Business Standard offers email archiving as part of its cloud-based productivity suite. This option is scalable, easy to set up and use. And it offers important email security and compliance features. With Microsoft email archiving, business users can:

• Access archived email messages from Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop app or Outlook mobile app.
• Search archived email messages using keywords, filters, and advanced query syntax.
• Apply retention policies to archived email messages to automatically delete or preserve them based on predefined criteria.
• Place archived email messages on hold to prevent deletion or modification for legal or investigative purposes.
• Export their archived email messages to a PST file or an Azure storage location for backup or migration purposes.

However, Microsoft email archiving does have several limitations that small businesses need to consider. For example, it does not support third-party email platforms or applications, such as Gmail or Thunderbird. And it does not provide granular control over archiving policies, such as excluding certain folders or attachments from archiving.

Additionally, certain archiving features remain tied to Microsoft licensing levels. Consequently, organizations may not benefit from uniform coverage throughout the organization. Since companies often choose to adjust licensing based on job functions, this can leave part of the workforce without adequate archiving features.

eGovernance Email Archiving

Like the Microsoft solution, eGovernance email archiving offers immediate scalability and 24×7 access to archived email messages. Powerful search capabilities aid users and eDiscovery efforts, and organizations can apply retention policies and automated holds. Also, important security controls keep the archives secure and compliant.

In addition, the eGovernance solution provides critical features not available through Microsoft. For instance, eGovernance:

• Supports multiple email platforms and applications, from Microsoft 365 to Gmail, Thunderbird and more.
• Provides granular control over archiving policies, such as excluding certain folders or attachments from archiving. Organizations can also apply retention rules based on keywords or metadata.
• Offers advanced features such as deduplication, compression, analytics, auditing, and reporting.
• Provides uniform coverage regardless of Microsoft licensing level. This means that discovery services and policy-based retention remain consistent across all enterprise and business licensing levels.

eGovernance does require some technical expertise to implement. Businesses will achieve optimal results when partnering with eGovernance consultants. However, users will find the system easy to use. Even beginners can perform sophisticated searches of their archives without memorizing Boolean syntax and statements.

How to Archive Email Records for Small Business with Expert Help

As organizations decide how to archive email records for small business, they should look carefully at their email environment and business needs. They should also review retention needs and regulatory requirements.

Whether organizations choose Microsoft or eGovernance for email archiving, the archiving consultants at eMazzanti and Messaging Architects can help. As Microsoft partners, and with deep expertise in eGovernance, they will ensure that organizations optimize the archiving process to support business goals.

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For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) mandates that publicly traded companies indefinitely retain emails related to insider dealings. Banking laws mandate a five-year retention period. Numerous additional laws and industry regulations require various retention periods for certain types of emails.

To stay compliant, companies turn to archiving solutions. But the various solutions offer a wide range of features, and organizations must define and enforce retention policies. The process can prove complex, but these best practices will help organizations achieve compliance while supporting productive work.

Business Email Archiving vs. Backup

Archiving differs from an email backup and involves more than simply storing a copy of electronic information. Whereas a backup provides short-term insurance in case of disaster or accidental deletion, archives provide quick access to decades of important data.

Businesses archive email for several reasons. In addition to regulatory compliance, they preserve electronic data to aid in internal investigations, as well as eDIscovery for litigation and documentation of intellectual property. Archives also streamline records management by removing old data out of active mailboxes.

Because archived data must remain preserved in its original form, archiving systems operate under specific requirements. The organization must implement strict security controls and ensure that archived data is not altered in any way. Emails and attachments within the archive should be indexed to facilitate quick search and retrieval of relevant data.

Carefully Review Regulatory Requirements

Any organization could be subject to multiple federal and state laws, as well as industry regulations. Each law or regulation has its own retention requirements, and failure to comply can result in hefty penalties, reputation damage or even prison time.

To complicate matters, new privacy laws such as California’s CPRA mandate timely disposal of certain types of information. As a result, companies can no longer take the easy way out and simply keep all emails indefinitely.

Keep an eye on the regulatory landscape and consult your legal team on a regular basis to ensure ongoing compliance.

Update Retention Policies Regularly

Retention policies play a critical role in archiving. These policies indicate what data should be retained and for how long. Because business needs and regulations change periodically, organizations should review and update retention policies at least annually. In addition to the legal team, stakeholders from every department should provide input.

Embrace Automation

No matter how carefully the compliance team documents retention policies, relying on users to implement the policies manually is neither feasible nor defensible. A good archiving system will include tools to automate enforcement of retention policies. With automation, archiving and disposal happen behind the scenes, according to policy and without end user intervention.

Ensure a Tamper-proof Archive

In the event of litigation and to demonstrate compliance, the organization must be able to show a defensible chain of custody and prove that electronic data has not been edited. This requires a tamper-proof archiving system. For instance, PST files do not provide the necessary protection against corruption and should be avoided.

In addition to guarding against data corruption and editing, archiving solutions must incorporate tight security controls. This includes data encryption, both in transit and at rest. And it includes solid access management with comprehensive auditing.

Explore the Benefits of Cloud-based Business Email Archiving

Modern cloud archive solutions provide a host of business benefits. For instance, eGovernance Cloud:

• Offers dynamic data management through policy-based retention and disposal of data.
• Ensures tamper-proof archives with a read-only view into older data.
• Saves storage space by eliminating duplication.
• Allows you to retain control of your data with unlimited export functionality.
• Provides powerful search tools for both beginners and professionals, making it easy to find the data you need quickly.
• Keeps data safe with a physically separate, searchable copy. Users can forward data back to the live system as necessary.

To streamline compliance and increase productivity in your organization contact an archiving specialist to explore eGovernance Cloud archiving solutions.

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As organizations moved their email operations to responsive and accessible cloud services such as Microsoft 365, legacy archiving solutions quickly lost ground to more up-to-date technology. Thus, rather than limp along with an outdated and poorly supported product, forward-looking business leaders choose to migrate to a modern cloud archiving solution.

Why organizations look to migrate:    

• Existing on-premise solutions require continuous licensing and physical upgrades of services and software
• Courted by legacy archive solution vendors to move to their cloud solutions
• They see platforms like Microsoft 365 as being a more economical solution for storage and consolidated eDiscovery services. (Organizations should seek to understand the limitations and potential costs for storing and managing legacy data in Microsoft 365)
• Consolidation of discovery services

Migrate All or Part?

Organizations with legacy archive systems may find that they no longer provide the functionality required by users. At the same time, regulatory compliance demands email retention, forcing them to examine and address the data in their legacy system.

Some consider migrating the total email archive to a cloud archiving solution. This option helps to ensure regulatory compliance. And the opportunity for virtually unlimited cloud storage makes it possible. However, moving the entire archive to the cloud solution may not be practical or feasible.

A second option includes consolidating data from the legacy archive to XML. Done correctly, the process results in a fully indexed archive that allows for eDiscovery. This option achieves compliance and saves time but makes archived data less accessible from active mailboxes. Hence, the preferred solution likely combines cloud migration with the creation of a partial XML repository.

Retain Control of Data

Some legacy archive vendors may persuade organizations to transfer data into their new SaaS cloud solution. Avoiding the support and infrastructure costs associated with the on-premises system provides the incentive. However, many of these solutions exact punitive charges for trying to extract your data or they enforce unyielding restrictions.

For example, on-premise archive systems typically integrate with third-party vendors for extraction of data. However, once the data is moved to that vendor’s cloud solution, those integrations quickly become unavailable.

Furthermore, vendors jealously guard and restrict access to the data, locking a lot of customers into a long-term relationship. Thereafter, it requires substantial capital to export data into the formats required for further processing.

While the data in your legacy system remains on site, you retain ultimate control over it. Thus, once moved to the cloud, you must ensure that you avoid the trap of giving up control as you transfer management and storage of the data.

Plan for Legacy Email Archive to Cloud Migration Success

Obstacles to a successful legacy email archive to cloud migration include massive data files, maintaining stub to message links, and chain of custody compliance issues. Despite the challenges, a combination of careful planning and the right tools lead to successful legacy archive migrations.

Start with a system review. Gather stakeholders with knowledge of the business requirements and the regulatory issues. With that team, assess the amount of data stored, the age of the data and the categories of information found within.

Then, before starting the actual migration, carefully outline the plan of attack. For instance, what data will you move to the new system, and what will you leave behind? Migrations present an excellent opportunity to update email retention policies and clean up bloated data files.

In addition, be sure to consider the implications of the migration. That means taking the time to review changes in functionality from user access and eDiscovery perspectives. Likewise, carefully examine the pending changes affecting data ownership and control.

Legacy Email Archive to Cloud Migration Experts

Partnering with email migration experts helps to ensure the success of the legacy email archive to cloud migration project. The migration experts at eGovernance understand not only the challenges of migrating data from legacy email archiving solutions but also the advantages and disadvantages to moving it to some cloud systems.

Through hundreds of legacy migrations and years of working with clients of all sizes, they have streamlined the legacy migration process. They help determine how much data to migrate and provide the tools to reconcile stubs with archived emails. They also ensure that the chain of custody necessary for full regulatory compliance is maintained.

Whether you use MXLogic, GWAVA Retain, HP Autonomy or another legacy system, eGovernance and the migration experts at eMazzanti Technologies take the frustration out of legacy migrations, leaving you free to address your core business needs. They know the roadblocks, and possess the tools and expertise to overcome them, ensuring a smooth migration to a modern cloud archive solution.

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Now, picture an organization that has implemented an optimized eDiscovery process with cloud-based eDiscovery tools. Rather than working long hours to search for data when litigation appears, they run various complex searches and compare results in seconds. Thus, they respond to eDiscovery requests quickly while reducing data collection and review costs.

eDiscovery Challenges

eDiscovery requests appear straightforward at first: Deliver all the information relevant to the pending case. But the subtleties of modern communication and information storage complicate the process in a variety of ways.

For example, organizations with a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy face a formidable data gathering challenge. Employees often combine personal and business use on laptops, tablets, and smartphones. In addition, they may use a variety of third-party applications to do their work and probably have not retained some critical information.

As devices and data storage locations multiply, increasing volumes of data must be searched and reviewed, ballooning eDiscovery costs.

Once a pending or lawsuit or preservation letter is received, one of the key steps is the deposition of the target company. At this point, the legal team is interested in determining what information is available from the organization.

Overcome eDiscovery Challenges with Consistent, Secure, and Quick eDiscovery Tools

Instead of reacting in a frenzy to requests for eDiscovery, modern organizations practice solid information governance, and employ effective eDiscovery tools that are consistent, secure, and quick:

• Consistent – Organizations need to produce consistent results when performing eDiscovery searches and have confidence in both the results they obtain as well as stating that confidence to the people requesting that data.
• Secure – Guaranteeing the integrity of the data is vital. Some eDiscovery systems are built into the data management systems or applications. These could be compromised “accidentally” or “willfully” by individuals tasked with maintaining system.
• Quick – The time to discover, search and produce information often requires multiple individuals with the associated costs in time and effort. Solutions should be quick, and efficient and reduce overall effort spent performing discoveries.

The Modern, Cloud-Based eDiscovery Approach

Consistent, secure, and quick eDiscovery tools empower legal teams to sift through all their data in minutes. These modern cloud-based solutions enable personnel to review and analyze data in place, then collect only relevant electronically stored information (ESI). Thus, they are enabled to:

• Perform all eDiscovery efforts in-house and decide sooner to litigate vs. settle to save money and resources.
• Identify and review relevant data before collection and confidently reduce the amount of data to collect, hold, and review.
• Process discovery requests quickly and reduces the risks of sanctions while maintaining a continuous chain of custody.

Modern eDiscovery tools expand eDiscovery from just email by adding data sources to index and search. They provide quick access to electronic information from various sources such as Microsoft OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, Citrix ShareFile, Box, Slack, Egnyte, and others.

The modern, cloud-based approach allows centralization of eDiscovery and the ability to keep critical data where it currently resides. Your data stays safe and protected there or you may want to extract copies to meet more strict retention requirements.

Quick eDiscovery Tools Reduce Costs

Modern, high-speed eDiscovery tools position organizations to:

• Reduce Costs – The bulk of eDiscovery costs arise from the collection and initial review of data to discover information pertinent to the discovery request. Streamlining this process saves time and dollars by limiting items produced for final review.
• Simplify the Process – Organizations today are spending more time with discovery. They need to simplify the process instead of complicating it with multiple tools, data formats and complex search tools and syntaxes.
• Shorten the Learning Curve – Discovery teams get up to speed quickly and easily using a familiar and easy-to-navigate web-based interface. Searching is simple with easy-to-understand search terms and intelligent syntax.
• Respond Quickly to eDiscovery Requests – No more scrambling. Teams locate and produce the needed information quickly, without interrupting regular business operations.
• Practice Early Case Assessment (ECA) – With a clear picture of the relevant data, business leaders and their counsel make informed strategic decisions early on.

For large or small organizations, these solutions should be able to scale to any number of users and any amount of data. Expect them to provide support for multiple auditors and allow for graduated access levels of security.

The Right Tools from eDiscovery Experts

Modern eDiscovery tools connect to all the organization’s unstructured data locations. They identify relevant data and maintain an up-to-date index of the information before any data is collected.

With consistent, secure, and quick eDiscovery tools and processes, business leaders gain visibility into data in seconds, reduce the data sets to present to attorneys, and accelerate early case assessment. It all adds up to much lower eDiscovery costs.

The best time to prepare for litigation is now, long before a court order appears. The consultants and project managers at eGovernance.com help organizations practice efficient eDiscovery. And with deep knowledge of Office 365 and other pertinent technologies, they can assist modern data and identity governance.

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Connected Archiving Accelerates Business

Working from the cloud allows connected users to work anytime from anywhere. With more staff working remotely, easy access to the tools and information needed for individuals and organizations to perform their assigned roles becomes critical.

The Cloud removes the pain arising from lack of access and inadequate distribution by allowing for shared files, real time updates and easy information flow. With your data hosted in the cloud, you’ll accelerate projects, improve decision making and deliver better customer service.

Azure Hosted Secure eGovernance Cloud

• Full Microsoft security around Azure
• Regionalized deployments if required (U.S. only at this point)
• Multi-hosted archive system
• Redundant virtualized server resources

Scalable Storage Adjusts Quickly

Working from the Cloud provides scalability at a moment’s notice. Should the amount of data in discovery, processing or storage increase, the Cloud automatically adjusts to support it quickly and easily.

Acquire a new company or downsize an old division? Cloud storage scales on demand, meeting your needs the moment they appear.

Cloud Storage Trims IT Budgets

Locating data in the cloud maximizes all your IT dollars. The Cloud provides affordable storage and saves on balance sheet headaches and capital purchases. Forget about buying equipment, building out, and operating a data center or computer closet.

You’ll enjoy a significant savings on hardware, facilities, utilities, and other expenses required by traditional computing. Likewise, the purchase of multiple software licenses and onsite servers goes away. Therefore, moving to the cloud trims your IT budget in exciting ways.

eGovernance Cloud is eCare Supported

• All servers monitored by eMazzanti Network Operations Center
• Standard system alerts plus application alerts
• 24X7 Monitoring and management of systems
• Daily data physical backups
• Automated patch management
• Automated server refreshes

Data Secured in the Cloud

Moving to the Cloud often raises security concerns. Many believe that since the Cloud is accessible and inherently tied to the internet, it is more vulnerable to cyber-attack. However, all modern IT systems invariably connect to the Internet.

Hence, whether your systems reside on premise or in the cloud, the degree of vulnerability remains the same. The cloud might even be less vulnerable, given empty office situations and updates that cause down time.

Cloud computing operates as a distributed network. Without a high concentration of data in one place, recovery from an attack happens more quickly and easily.

eGovernance Cloud is Fully Managed

• Managed by qualified application administrators
• Zero risk of misconfiguration
• Elimination of privilege user caused data loss (compliance)
• Audited and authorized change control
• Ongoing review and pre-emptive remediation of issues

Recoverable

Hosting systems and storing documents on the cloud provides for an intelligent approach to disaster recovery. Man-made and natural disasters tend to damage equipment, shut off power, and incapacitate critical IT functions.

With today’s remote workforce, many hardware-centric IT department personnel can’t gain physical access to on-premises systems in an emergency. That may show up as a security risk if staff can’t actively or remotely patch and update the technology. With your data in the Cloud, you’ll enjoy redundancy and accessibility no matter what, should a disaster happen.

eGovernance Cloud is Secure and Recoverable

• Secured Azure environment with physical SOC2 compliance and encryption of all data at rest and in transit
• Data integrity with full hardware redundancy and data backups
• Fully administered (systems and application), reducing IT management overhead, costs, and potential misconfiguration
• Data secured from accidental or malicious destruction or alteration by all parties, including privileged users without formal requests and controls
• Available 24X7 from any location or from restricted locations with a 99.9% sustained uptime

Affordable and Connected Archiving

With a low monthly fee, eGovernance Cloud compares in cost to Microsoft Archiving but works much faster. It requires no administration, resulting in reduced IT overhead. Redundant storage and backup protect against disaster outages and data loss.

A flexible tool, eGovernance Cloud supports multiple and varied data sources, both cloud and local. Its quick search capabilities save expensive user and resource time. And its efficient open architecture allows for quick and easy export or migration of archived data.

At eMazzanti Technologies, we believe the CUSTOMER owns the data. Therefore, we have no restrictions on the export of data. In fact, we provide easy and economical options for exporting of data to industry standard formats or for migration directly to other solutions such as Microsoft 365.

We’re seeing a new normal for IT departments, archiving and compliance. The information governance experts at eMazzanti stand ready to address your archiving questions and concerns relating to the new and varied challenges you face.

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