There is simply no way to understate the importance of email in the business world today. We’ve all seen the statistics stating the astronomical amount of electronic messages sent and received daily. Whether your clients find themselves receiving ten or one hundred emails a day, it is extremely important, from both a business continuity and compliance perspective, to safely save and file these vital communications and attachments.
Archiving categorizes and protects the information contained in emails systematically. This process serves as a historical reference, not just a data backup. While preserving this content is especially important for businesses where data permanence is of high priority, archiving ensures organizations can retrieve messages to comply with federal, state, or local laws to resolve legal issues. Timely recovery is the key.
Archiving offers numerous benefits for every size organization, including the SMB. Here are the top seven advantages MSPs can promote to their clients to help sell more of these vital email solutions:
1. Preserves Messages
Perhaps the most obvious reason to get your customers to utilize archiving is that it saves and protects messages. A perfect example of this benefit comes during employee transitions (when one leaves and another is onboarded). Replacement workers may be granted access to the archives containing their predecessor’s business-related communications records, allowing them to get up to speed quicker on client issues and opportunities. Email archiving eases workplace transitions and improves productivity.
2. Eases Compliance
Protecting business data is not only sensible; in most cases it’s mandatory, particularly for financial institutions, healthcare facilities, government entities, and organizations in other highly regulated industries. Nearly every business is required to maintain an easy-to-access archive of its email records. Federal regulations such as the Dodd-Frank Act, FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act all place strict stipulations on how long to retain electronic messages and provide lists of required security measures.
3. Speeds Records Searches
Who enjoys sifting through thousands of messages to find specific information? Archiving platforms allow you or your clients to search through indexed content in seconds. Your customers can simply tag and comment on messages to ease accessibility, increasing productivity, and reduce employee stress when they need to quickly locate files.
4. Lessens Data Storage Costs
The file size and volume of incoming emails can quickly overwhelm servers and slow down the system. Archiving reduces the messages stored on the server, freeing up capacity and productivity. Archiving applications have fewer storage requirements than centralized systems, too. For example, if multiple messages contain the same attachment, the solution only retains one instance of that file, which streamlines retention and backup processes and lowers overall data management costs.
5. Reduces Errors
Everyone makes mistakes, and unfortunately quite a few of those errors involve email. How often have you or a client accidentally deleted an important message? No need to panic and waste hours looking through thousands of messages in the trash folder. An archiving system will make that search both quick and easy.
6. Enhances Data Backup
Backup and archiving solutions go hand in hand, allowing your clients to save, file, and restore their email data more efficiently. One should not be implemented without the other as neither can address compliance requirements and perform all those other critical tasks on its own. Backup is essentially a single snapshot that will be replaced by a new copy at a future point in time, so if a user deletes or corrupts an email before the system takes a new image, they can expect to lose that information. Archiving ensures those messages are safe, automatically saving, filing, and protecting each communication file.
7. Covers All Users (Onsite and Remote)
Many companies, both big and small, allow employees to work outside the traditional office today. With email archiving, remote workers don’t have to save files to a separate system nor risk losing email messages between backups. Through the cloud, those employees can now store and access files anytime, even when not connected to the corporate network.
The Partner Proposition
In a time when more business data stored in email systems than we could possibly know what to do with it, don’t underestimate the value of managing that information with ease. Whether your clients must adhere to government regulations or industry rules, or simply need to meet their own corporate guidelines, they can reap the benefits of archiving.
That’s another great reason for partnering with Mailprotector. Get the most intuitive tools that make archiving a breeze for your clients as well as for your own team. Learn about our SecureStore email archiving solution and get the latest details on the Mailprotector partner program today.
