For smaller organizations that manage their own systems, email server platforms — such as Microsoft Exchange — can present some special challenges.
Long-term retention of emails is important for a number of reasons.
– First, many employees rely on their email accounts as a kind of “database” of their past activities. They need the ability to go back and search through historical conversations in order to locate information that’s immediately useful.
– But more importantly, long-term email retention is critically important for legal compliance reasons.
However, this is a problem since email data is growing exponentially. And not much can be done to stop this growth since email is the core communications medium for most business transactions today.
As hard drives get full, their speed and performance will begin to degrade. Although data continues to grow exponentially, hardware budgets are not growing along the same exponential curve.
One elegant solution is to use a “tiered storage” approach, with the help of an email archiving system.
With email archiving, older email data is periodically removed from expensive live production server disks, and copied over to an archival storage facility for long-term preservation. Since older or inactive data is rarely used, this allows system resources to be prioritized for more recent email data which is more frequently accessed.
With cloud-based email archiving, employees can still access their older archival emails when stored in the cloud. For the end-user, there is no noticeable difference. But for IT administrators, this can provide a significant boost in email server performance in a way that’s very cost-effective.
To learn more about how email archiving can help optimize performance of Microsoft Exchange servers, we’ve included this short video.