Email archiving for systems administrators

The exponential growth of email and its importance as a business communication tool is expected to impact heavily on organizations. While email compliance will be management's and the legal department's headache, the IT department and system administrators will be more concerned with how they are going to store and manage an ever-increasing volume of email.

According to Osterman Research, three out of five companies consider the growth in email storage to be a major concern and that one terabyte of data today will increase to 2.5 terabytes in three years. That is a lot of data to handle and system administrators need to understand that unless they implement an email archiving and management solution, they risk storage problems at Exchange Server level, difficulty to retrieve emails from backup and more and more complaints from users whose emails saved as PST files are lost or now longer accessible.

Email archiving can help system administrators manage email storage by reducing the impact from the growth of email volume in the following ways:

1. Retrieving old and deleted email
Going through backups to find old and deleted emails can be a nightmare for a systems administrator who does not have the time to trawl through backups to look for emails that an employee is not 100% certain when they were sent or received.
With email archiving implemented, the administrators can give employees – either through a web-browser or their Outlook client – access to all their old and deleted emails, the ability to search for particular conversations and to restore emails with a few clicks, thereby reducing email management requirements.

2. Eliminate mailbox quotas
Mailbox quotas are a daily problem for administrators and these are often needed to prevent the mail server from running out of space. Employees are reluctant to delete email and therefore want more and more storage space. Having email archiving in place, however, would solve any mailbox quota issues because employees will know that all their corporate email is being archived and they can access it at any time. No more employees sulking because their mailbox is full!

3. Losing emails as retention periods are reached
To save on storage space, administrators configure retention policies on the email server to delete emails after a certain period of time. When this occurs, unless email archiving is available, important emails will be deleted. Employees may also be under the impression that their old emails are safely stored in their inboxes, when in fact old emails are being deleted when the retention period runs out. While retrieval is possible from backups, this is time-consuming. With email archiving, the process only takes minutes.

4. Pains of PST management
To avoid email being deleted because of retention policies or mailbox quotas, many users save their email to PST files which are stored on their local machine or on a network share.

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