Email communication is critical to every business. According to Osterman research, 75% of email content is necessary for successful company operations. This only shows organizations need to have some kind of email archiving facility to retain valuable content.

Businesses can avail two options in email archiving- they can store all email records on their in-house mail server or they can use cloud-based email archiving services.  The latter option is preferred by most businesses and here are the reasons why cloud-based email archiving is more beneficial.

1.       Lower and More Predictable Costs

It is no exaggeration to say that email archiving can be expensive considering different factors associated with it. If you are planning to develop an on-site email archiving solution, you need to get new servers and compatible storage hardware to store the increasing volume of messages.

When you employ cloud-based email archiving solution, you are not required to worry about the infrastructure needed. The vendor takes care of all requirements that include satisfying hardware and software requirements and setting things for you.

Since the cloud-based solution is based at the data center run by the vendor, you don’t have to worry about the maintenance fees and hiring the staff to manage the email archiving solution for you.

2.       Flexible Storage Management

Managing email archiving in-house could be intimidating and difficult task for any business. According to an industry survey conducted by Mimecast, 49% of companies had to upgrade their storage infrastructure to cope up with growing email demands.

On the other hand, cloud-based solutions offer scalable storage space and organizations have the freedom to flex up or down to meet the storage requirements.  The charges are levied as per mailbox without considering the need for hardware and software upgrades required to keep up with internal changes.

3.       Faster Recovery and Stronger Data Backup

If you have email archiving solution on site, it might happen that any employee having access to archives may delete important mail intentionally or unintentionally.  If you ask IT, people, restoring deleted mail can be a tough task and it may take a few hours to a few weeks.

With cloud-based solutions, there is a remote possibility of loss of important data in the mail as it is difficult to tamper or delete mail in the cloud. Email archived in the cloud is generally stored in encrypted form and it is a common practice followed by cloud solutions vendors to store every email in its original format mirrored to multiple locations. Hence, the recovery of deleted mail from the backup is also faster in comparison to the onsite solution.

4.       Better Regulatory Compliance

There is no evidence why the cloud-based solution is less secure for email archiving than on-premise infrastructure. On the contrary, the email archiving vendors have the skills and experience need to ensure the “common problems” do not persist.

With cloud-based email archiving, organizations can store sensitive data away from prying eyes. Also, the SLA of the email archiving vendors guarantees the customer’s data will only be stored in appropriate jurisdictions to ensure compliance with the regulations set for specific sectors.

5.       Enhanced Productivity

With email archiving moved to the cloud, IT staff will be free to focus on core tasks. The email archiving solution in the cloud is automated requiring less or no human intervention. Cloud providers employ scalable storage techniques which mean your IT department don’t have to manage storage.

Though the email archiving is done in the cloud, your organization still holds granular control over the emails and the content. The cloud service providers present your IT managers with dashboards that give them more control and visibility into the systems from any locations.

Though the email archives are stored in data center managed by your vendor, important aspects such as policy-based deletion and records management are completely under your organization’s control. The cloud-based email archiving can be integrated with popular email clients like Outlook and users can find and restore messages from archives intuitively just like drag and drop commands.

The benefits of cloud-based email archiving are crystal clear.  Having a centralized and fully managed email archiving is not the only ticket to cost control and efficiency; it is a passport to corporate confidence and lawful compliance.

The demand for email archiving systems is on the rise, as more and more organizations started realizing the many benefits such systems offer their organizations. The overwhelming number of emails an organization receives–including junk and promotional mail along with useful exchange of communication between the employees of the organization or communication with outsiders including vendors, business partners etc. – on a daily basis clogs the inbox of the organizations.

Organizations may find it difficult to store all such messages, which creates serious space issues. And, retrieving important communication for future references becomes a challenge that requiring wading through thousands of emails that reach your inbox every day.

Email archiving systems perform a broader function as compared to the usual data back up and as such serves greater purposes. Data backup primarily involves restoring data, files in case of disasters such as disk failure, etc., on the other hand, email archiving helps recover such data along with minute details including the date of creation of the files, modification dates, etc., which also serves as proof for future references.

Email archiving system helps organizations save millions of money and valuable time, as archiving systems helps organizations an alternate way to access such emails via a self-serviced portal during downtimes. During downtimes when your tech team tries to retrieve your primary emails; your employees can still access their archived emails minimizing the effects of downtime.

Apart from increased productivity, email archiving offers many benefits to organizations, which include protection of intellectual data, monitoring employee activity, and following various regulatory compliances. Here is a list of benefits such archiving systems can offer businesses of any size and shape.

• Saves Space:Email archiving helps saves valuable disk space for latest and more relevant information that incoming emails contain. As the relevance of email increases, the number of emails any organization receives also increased and with attachments sent within the emails, their size also has become an issue. Saving such emails on your live server becomes very expensive to the organization where 100s of employees work. When such emails clog your inbox, it may not accommodate any further emails resulting in loss of potential business opportunities for your organization. Deleting some of the emails may not be an option, as they contain important data and information, alternatively subscribing for more space, server may cost your organization more money. Moving emails to a central archive or archiving emails is an efficient and cost effective option for organizations to preserve and protect valuable data while making space for new incoming emails to the organization without requiring heavy investment or causing data loss.

• Protecting Intellectual property of an organization: Employees generate important data and information for an organization, which could include generating leads, contacts of important authorities in an organization, and more. Such information serves as a great knowledge for future reference, and such data helps organization gain in potential business opportunities or find quality vendors, human resources, etc. Archiving your old emails helps organizations a great deal in protecting its intellectual property. The valuable information that these emails contain helps in future training of their new employees, presentation in meetings, sharing of details, etc.

• Improves Employee Productivity: With an email archiving solution, it becomes easy for employees to find an email that they have received in the past. The archiving system uses an indexing method, which avoids the pain of wading through the history of emails, digging piles of emails, to reach to the exact email that contains the required information. Indexed archiving of emails helps employees to find the email they need, right way without spending too much time on looking into the piles of emails saves time and improves productivity of the employees.

• Archiving helps solve Legal Issues: With all the data stored allowing easy access, legal departments can prepare proactively for any potential lawsuits. In addition, legal provisions require that organization preserve certain legal documents for a specific period. Without an effective archiving system in place, it becomes difficult for organizations to comply with such legal requirements.

• Regulatory Compliances: Apart from meeting legal compliances, email archiving also helps comply with many other regulatory compliances. Such compliances require many industries such as medical and healthcare, finance, energy, etc., to preserve and maintain the business documents and data for a certain amount of time.

Email archiving offers organization effective ways to protect, preserve and produce highly important data for furthering business goals, defending the organization against law suits, improving the skills and knowledge of its human resources and finally complying with many legal and regulatory laws in the most cost-effective and easy manner.

Email eavesdropping is a big threat to sensitive data that is exchanged through emails. Today your email is just like an open postcard sent into the real world where anyone who can intercept can read the contents.

You will be surprised to know the security protocols of SMTP do nothing to protect data. Your email goes unprotected from your mail server to the destination mail server.  The only way to keep your email communication safe is using email encryption. We are going to tell you how to keep your emails safe with email encryption solution.

Use Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME)

Multipurpose Internet email extension (MIME) is an extension of SMTP.  It provides you the ability to send data like video, compressed files, images, applications as attachments. The MIME inserts header in the email and the email clients utilize the information provided by MIME to know which applications should be used to open attachments. MIME does not provide security to your emails, but S/MIME does.

S/MIME is a protocol that secures your mail by using digital signatures and encrypting the MIME attachments sent through the mail. The protocol provides security services like message authentication, message integrity and data security to emails. Email communication is secured by symmetric encryption. A public key algorithm is used for key exchange and digital signatures.

To use S/MIME, you will be required to get a digital ID from your organization’s administrator and install the S/MIME control on your computer.

Use PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)

PGP is another method for email encryption. It offers both symmetric and asymmetric encryption. In the symmetric encryption method, the email contents are encrypted using a symmetric algorithm. After the encryption of the message, the public key that was used to encrypt the message is also encrypted with the public key of the recipient.  The encrypted message and the key are sent to the recipient.

At the receiving end, PGP will first decrypt the symmetric key with the private key provided by the recipient. The decrypted symmetric key is then used to decrypt the message in the email.  To use PGP, you will be required to install a browser extension to get encryption on the fly.

Use TLS encryption service offered by Gmail

Gmail offers encryption of emails in transit using TLS protocol. TLS is the successor to SSL. When messages are sent from your Gmail account, they are encrypted using TLS protocol that ensures there is no eavesdropping or interception of your email when it is on route to the recipient’s inbox.

When you use TLS in Gmail, your incoming and outgoing messages are encrypted automatically.  Sometimes, you may send an encrypted mail, but the email may not receive full protection of the TLS during transit because not all email services support TLS. If the receiver’s email service does not support TLS, the email encryption does not work as intended.

Use Email Encryption Software

One of the easy ways to encrypt your email communication is to use email encryption software.   The sender is required to install the email encryption software while the receiver need not install the software. The encrypted mail can be viewed through the web console. Also the encryption method is compatible with most platforms, making things easy for the recipient.

Use Encryption Tools in Outlook

Microsoft Outlook offers you an easy way to encrypt email communication. You have a choice of encrypting a specific message or encrypt all outgoing messages. To encrypt single message, just go to Options and select encrypt message and attachments. To encrypt all outgoing messages, just go to Email security option and select encrypt contents and attachments of all outgoing messages.

Using Web Based Email Encryption Services

If you want to secure your email communication without much hassle, you can use web based email filtering and encryption solutions. These encryption solutions are installed between Internet gateway and your email server.

The encryption service provider ensures every mail that exits your email server is encrypted and the email remains protected until it reaches its intended recipient. Even in the event of email eavesdropping, there is no risk to the sensitive data in the email as it remains unreadable.

Do you use email encryption to keep your email communication safe?

Gone are the days when we never need to worry about the email security. Today, it is no longer safe to send sensitive information through email as someone with right hacking tools can snoop on you and read the information easily.

But, luckily there is a solution available to protect your data from rising email security threats. And that is email encryption service.

Encrypting an email means making the message included in the email completely unreadable to anyone who does not have the deciphering key. If you are looking to secure your email communication, then you probably need to look for a good email security service. Here are some reasons why you need an encrypted email service.

Your Regular Email Is Not Secure as You Think

Regular email is transmitted in plain text over the Internet. It is not protected by SSL/TLS during transmission, which means the content of the email can be accessed by any eavesdropper when the mail is on the route from sender to receiver.

Not much expertise or advanced technology is required to intercept sensitive information in the messages. The information leak can happen even if one of the hosts is infected with malware. The sensitive information can be accessed even when the email communication is between two users in the same organization.

Convenient and Easy to Use

When you opt for an encrypted email service, you don’t need to install any additional software or perform any additional steps to secure your online communication. The vendor providing encrypted email services takes all the steps required at both ends (sender and receiver) to secure the email communication using encryption technologies.

Protection Against Phishing Attempts

An encrypted email service checks all incoming and outgoing emails for malicious code. Such emails are filtered out of the system, thereby ensuring no phishing or spam email reaches the inbox of any user in your organization. The email protection service also builds a level of trust in the mind of the recipient by establishing email addresses of your organization as a trusted source.

Protect Financial Information

 It is quite common nowadays to send invoices, bills, and important information through email. Thus unknowingly, we tend to store financial information in our email accounts. When you use an encrypted email service, all emails are stored on the server in encrypted form. This means even if the account is hacked, the information in the mail is not readable to the hacker.

 Email Recall

Sending an email to the wrong person can be risky for businesses. In general, it is not possible to recall an email after sending it. However, many encrypted mail service providers give you access to tools that allow you to recall secured email at any time

Helps You Stay Compliant

Depending on the nature of your business, you need to take email compliance seriously unless you want to face litigations and pay hefty fines for non-compliance.  The HIPAA act makes it mandatory for companies involved in health care to implement policies and technologies that ensure confidentiality of the information in storage and during transmission.

Businesses need to clearly identify confidential data like credit cards, personally identifiable information, and electronic health records and make sure they are stored and sent in encrypted form. Employing an encrypted email service ensures you business meets email compliance regarding the safety of data.

Cuts Down Expenses

 If you plan to deploy encryption tools within the organization for securing email communication, you will be required to invest in encryption software that is generally expensive. Such software is charged per user or per email account that can lead to significant expenses.

Besides licensing costs, your organization needs to spend funds on maintaining software and provide training and technical support to users. You can get freedom from all these hassles and also eliminate these costs by opting for an encrypted email service that is available at comparatively lower cost.

Email is a universally accepted mode of communication which will stay with us for years. Employing an email encryption service will ensure the communication and sensitive data sent through email is safe from prying eyes.

What’s the first thing you would do as soon as you wake up? If ‘I check my emails’ is your answer, this article is for you. We are all aware how email has been the dominant form of communication in the corporate sector from decades together. Though newer technologies like text messages, video calls and social media have stormed the consumer market, they are still not able to overtake emails in the corporate sector. 4 out of 5 business organizations all over the world consider this form of communication the most appropriate, owing to its to the point nature, flexibility to attach a wide array of content, speed and of course, reliable delivery.

But what happens when your mail service is not reliable anymore, and you are always anticipating an outage? Does most of your corporate communication rely on email and do you feel ‘what’s the point of sticking to emails if you can’t send a message whenever you want’? Are you fed up of email outages in your company and wish there was some kind of backup that could fix this? If yes, then email continuity services are here for your rescue, ensuring uninterrupted service 24/7/365. Read on to know why these services are so essential for your business organization.

What is Email Continuity?

Emails are sent from one place to another using servers that are placed on both sides. So if there is an outage happening, it must be either because of a bad internet connection or an email server that’s down. Bad internet connections can be fixed but bad servers that are down, but not so easily! Snow blizzards, heavy rainfall, tornadoes, short circuits, traffic surge, shortage of power and bandwidth, the reason for an email outage could be anything. But whatever the case, an outage is not at all acceptable when you are missing out on so many important mails, losing thousands of dollars, seeing your employees lose focus and experiencing a severe productivity crisis.

This is where email continuity services come in, with their back up servers that can immediately take over as soon as there is a server outage. Hence, zero interruption of mail services 24/7/365. These services are cloud based services that offer immediate, temporary solutions until the primary server is back up and running. You wouldn’t experience a second of technical glitch and most importantly, won’t lose a single mail.

Other Advantages of Email Continuity Services

Though uninterrupted email service in all cases of emergencies is enough reason to opt email continuity services, there are many other reasons to invest in these services. Read on to know.

• Maintenance Free- Server maintenance is one of the most tedious operational tasks, requiring a great amount of computational resources and a technical team to administer the various equipment involved. However, email continuity is a cloud based service, which means you don’t have to invest on any hardware equipment nor worry about its tedious maintenance.

• No Additional Software- These services can be directly integrated into your existing email system, thus avoiding the need of new software purchases and also a new mail setup. Your employees need not change their email addresses as well, as email continuity doesn’t entirely take over the primary server and will be operating only as a temporary service.

• No Mailbox Size Limit- Though the outage is only for a short period of time, if you are big organization it is certain that you need a big mailbox, given the fact that hundreds of mails will be exchanged every minute. To accommodate such huge requirements, these continuity services have no limit on their mailbox sizes.

• Any Number of Users- For a temporary service, email continuity has another big advantage. You can enroll any number of users to the service at costs as low as $1 per user/month. Thus, none of your employees have to struggle during the outage and be the reason for an irreversible delay chain.

• Cheap- Lastly, these services are very cheap when compared to the amount of losses borne by companies in the absence of a backup server. Many important mails could be lost, a lot of transactions could be stopped abruptly and above all, productivity can come to a standstill, which itself is a huge loss.