The practice of regularly backing up email servers is important as a means of being able to restore server data in the event of a failure. An email archiving system, on the other hand, is intended to capture email-borne information that is useful for corporate decision-making in the context of regulatory compliance and other purposes. Backups and archiving, then, are complementary activities, not substitutes for one another.
Email archiving is implemented for a variety of reasons, including
- Legal & regulatory compliance
- Storage optimisation - moving old messages to archive systems
- Knowledge management - long term data mining
- End user access to old information
Email archiving may be deployed via
- Software installed on in-house servers
- Dedicated appliances
- In the cloud archiving services
Software installed in-house
Installing software on an in-house server can provide a relatively low cost solution. Using existing spare servers the hardware cost may be minimal. The main disadvantage of this approach is that administrative effort is likely to be significantly larger than for other solutions. Administrative tasks include software deployment & maintenance, operating system upgrades and patches, and server hardening against unauthorised access.
Appliances
Email archiving appliances are an attractive alternative, being relatively low cost and requiring little in the way of maintenance and care.
Hosted Services
In the cloud solutions are the simplest to deploy and can therefore be live within the shortest time-frame. Such solutions are fully maintained by the service provider's staff on a 24x7 basis, offering very high levels of reliability and support. Such solutions may however cost more per user than software or appliance based solutions.
Please contact us to discuss your requirements with one of our storage specialists. We can advise you on a variety of software, appliance and hosted service solutions.