The importance of email in business communications

According to available research and statistics on how companies and organizations communicate, email continues to dominate over other channels. As reported by MailStore, citing data from Statista.com, in 2017, email users worldwide sent and received an average of 269 trillion emails per day. In 2015, on the other hand, the University of California conducted a study on the frequency of checking email. The results showed that the average user checks his or her email inbox 77 times a day. The record holder, a manager working at an American corporation, looked at his email inbox 373 times on the same day. The survey was conducted in 2015. To this day, the use of email in communication, at the level of companies and organizations, has grown and continues to grow, ranking this form of information transfer in the top position, for which it is difficult to find a better or even comparable alternative.

This is confirmed by the aforementioned forecasts, published by Statista.com, showing the number of emails sent and received daily worldwide from 2017 to 2022.

 

Statista.com data

 

Email as the main location of many key company information  

However, e-mail is not only an essential communication tool, but also one of the most important and valuable information resources in a company and in business. It is very often the case that content and materials transmitted via e-mail, are not stored in any other places and the mail is their only location.

Thus, the need arises to secure a company or organization against the loss of often valuable information or data located on mail, in case of a server failure, or even the purging of mailboxes by employees changing work locations.

One way to secure the information collected on mailboxes is to create long-term backups, known as backups. Companies or organizations usually have well-functioning e-mail servers or other software designed for group e-mail communication, but these systems, however, are often not designed to store information and data over the long term. In practice, this can lead to a number of technical, legal and even financial problems.

Email archiving - in the simplest terms - is an extension of the existing email system, which, depending on the needs of the organization, is managed by the administrator. The task of archiving is to efficiently manage large amounts of data, to be able to conveniently search and share archived messages while reducing server load.

 

Archiving vs backup

Email archiving and backup do not mean the same thing. They are two different forms of securing data and information, which are not mutually exclusive, but effectively complementary.

Backup is not a substitute for mail archiving, which gives us 100% the guarantee of the integrity of the archives and the assurance that all messages, both outgoing and incoming, have been archived, even despite the deletion of mail or the manipulation of local PST archives by users.

The basic idea of any archiving operation is to ensure that all data and files can be retrieved, quickly searched through indexing mechanisms, and quickly and conveniently provide access to them for a long time regardless of local PST files. This is especially important in light of legislation that imposes on companies and organizations the need to properly process, store and secure emails, including their contents. This is one of the main differences between archiving and backup, which secures our data and information only for a limited period.

In addition to backup, data processed in the company can be secured in yet another way - by creating backups on external devices. In this case, however, there is the greatest risk of tampering with the data on the external media. It is easy to delete the content in question - whether immediately upon receipt or before the backup itself. Archiving, by synchronizing in the background with the mail server, makes it possible to create and save 1:1 incoming and outgoing content from a given mailbox, regardless of the activities performed on it. In addition, all messages are stored in a central archive, which does not affect the operation of the company's servers, and even causes a reduction in their load.

Among the differences between backup and email archiving, it is important to additionally point out such elements as:

• server load reduction,

• Elimination of mailbox size restrictions,

• Eliminate the importance of PST files and make the data security process independent of local PST archives,

• Reducing memory size requirements through de-duplication and compression processes,

• Complete archiving of all e-mails,

• Tamper-proofing of archived messages,

• News indexing (full text) for quick search,

• simple and quick restoration of lost messages,

• Meeting legal requirements.

Backup cannot replace and provide an archiving function. This, in turn, cannot replace traditional backup tasks. It is clear that backups, from the point of view of any company or organization, are necessary. However, supplementing this process with mail archiving, which provides quick and complete access to data and information from mailboxes, even after a disaster, ensures that an organization is protected from a number of dangers associated with processing information electronically.

Source: http://ictprofessional.pl/archiwizacja-poczty-e-mail-vs-backup-co-wybrac/

 

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