Email continues to be the backbone of modern business communication. As volumes of email increase, so do storage requirements. Rules and regulations for data retention require archiving for some businesses. Is it possible to affordably archive email? Let's take a look at it.
Archiving Challenges
Email data volume grows constantly, and as more and more businesses convert to paperless communications and online business operations, that volume will grow even more. For some businesses, regulations such as HIPAA and SOX require retention of data and information in email for extended periods. Not only are recent backups required in order for potential day-to-day restoration and recovery needs, but defined long-term backups are as well. Preservation of emails for discovery and compliance purposes also requires that emails have not been tampered with. This adds additional cost and effort.
Archiving Economically
Storage is cheap. Over time, storage costs have plummeted per megabyte. This of course is good news for archiving. Network, data transfer, and bus speeds have increased, but transfer still takes considerable time. Differential or incremental backup techniques are imperative in order to accomplish our goal. Full backups on every cycle are simply not practical, even with the low costs of storage--it doesn't make sense to spend the time to transfer all the data.
Figuring out how to optimally take as many incremental / differential backups as possible is the key to maximizing economy of backups. The restores become more complex and time consuming, as the full backup or backups needed must be sought out, and then the following incremental restores needed must be pulled as well to reconstruct the restore. With a sound solution most of this will be automatic and transparent.
Is It Possible?
For small businesses, companies like GFI offer email archiving solutions that leverage the low cost of storage and in-house administration to provide an inexpensive per-user or per-mailbox cost. Such products are aimed at Exchange and Outlook specifically as they are the most prevalent by far for corporate business email. Other businesses may benefit from off-site archiving and storage. Some businesses host their email off-site already, so archiving off-site as well is a clear win if the price is right.
So, can you archive cheaply? Well, that depends on your business and the volume of email you're dealing with. The question may be better phrased, "how cheaply can you afford to archive?" Saving some money now but in doing so failing to meet regulatory and legal requirements can cost far more in the long run. Since the potential costs are extremely high later if archiving requirements aren't met, the time value of money doesn't make sense to risk it.