Implementing an email archiving solution can solve a great many problems, but you’ll get a great many questions when you’re in the planning stage–not the least of which is, “Why do we need to do this?”

Here are just a few reasons to start with:

1. Discovery response. Your legal department will love it. Lawyers love paperwork—even electronic paperwork. It’s their lifeblood, their currency. In the process of legal investigations, your legal department will no doubt want to retrieve all email message that are relevant to a particular case or issue. Those email records may be vital as evidence, and so long as they are properly stored with standard security safeguards, they are admissible in court.
2. Compliance. A host of government regulations now govern IT security, privacy, and retention of documents. To comply with these regulations, a proper archiving system is often necessary, as standard backup may not be adequate in terms of security.
3. Disaster Recovery. You may have ready access to backed up data files, but without those important emails—which often contain valuable and important information—you will still be lost. Email is a major asset to the business—and having access to them from an off-site secure redundant server is a critical part of disaster recovery.
   
4. Server performance. A mail server can get overloaded in a surprisingly short period of time, especially in an environment where emails with very large attachments are sent on a regular basis. An automated process for offloading emails from the email server, while keeping them easily retrievable, will help keep that in check and keep down costs
5. Reduce or eliminate reliance on PST files. PST files can become corrupted, and may lead to several problems in terms of access and searchability; shifting to another method will make email archiving easier for both end-users and IT staff alike.
6. More efficient search and retrieval. Saving old emails is pointless if it takes hours to find the right one and retrieve it. Proper archiving, as opposed to use of PST files or just standard backup, will provide better tools for searching and retrieving important old emails.
7. End-user convenience. Without a system in place, end-users will resort to simply deleting emails that need to be saved, keeping very large inboxes that rapidly become unwieldy, or attempting to sort old emails into multiple subfolders, which are not searchable and not chronological as a whole.
8. Email Admin convenience. The archiving system will provide an easier path to email backup, and provide for faster network backup time because of lighter email servers.
9. Security. Without an archiving system, the security of older emails may be compromised. Individual inboxes may not be secured, and employees may resort to offloading emails onto external data such as optical disks or thumb drives, which are open to easy theft.
10. HR management. When an employee leaves under unfavorable conditions, it has happened that they trash hard drives or erase data on their computers—an archiving system ensures that their email records are kept in a safe place.