The arena is heating up for more companies to explore email archiving solutions. This is a result of the Sarbanes Oxley Act triggering regulatory compliance, legal discovery and storage management issues. Evaluating email archiving solutions is critical if you want to effectively overcome business challenges that come up in the future. Now is the time to plan before you are forced to scramble for a solution to track and retrieve historical information stored within emails.

Here is a high level overview of options to consider for implementing an email archiving solution. There is a good chance business efficiency will be improved and may provide savings to your bottom line.  This list is not comprehensive, but provides food for thought to jump start some strategy meetings.  This is not just an IT Department project – make a list of other key departments to include (i.e. legal, human resources, senior management etc.)

• Do we really need to archive? - Email is the most used software application in any company. The daily existence of a company relies on email. What happens when email is unavailable for just an hour?  People go ballistic, especially senior management. So email is a mission critical system that requires archiving for historical referencing.

• Electronic discovery and litigation – When the legal department or any other department requests specific documents to be produced for court cases, consider it a priority to company survival.

• Saving time and expense – Having a structured methodology for retrieving historical information needs to be planned in advance.

• Regulatory and Corporate compliance - Beyond Sarbanes Oxley, current global economic crises are a sign of things to come. Future government regulations may require more transparent availability of email and document attachments.

• Storage management – Being able to balance the needs of email users accessing current and historical information is fast becoming more crucial. The other part is managing storage mediums to allocate enough space for email accounts to grow.

• Managing the Knowledge base – As employees exit and new people are hired, being able to manage previously acquired knowledge is very important.  New staff can get up to speed in their role if they have documents developed, created or received by people who previously held that position.