Jatheon Email Archiving Blog

A recent study has indicated that 49% of SMB’s in the UK and US have implemented email archiving, leaving 51% without the protection and benefits that email archiving affords. Why so? It’s probably because the main focus of IT departments is on solutions that directly increase productivity, and the other areas of IT can be pushed down the priority list. The thing is, email archiving actually does contribute to increased productivity across the organization. In addition, it’s got a ton of other benefits including reducing costs and aiding compliance. Let me explain:

eDiscovery readiness is now almost mandatory in most industries. You can’t come across a new legal case without eDiscovery processes being involved. Because of this, there has been a huge move towards eDiscovery adoption and companies are seeking to integrate eDiscovery policies and appliances, like email archiving with integrated discovery functions.

We’ve been looking at the pros and cons of archiving with Exchange 2010 recently and we’ve concluded that while the inbuilt archiving features are an asset to the platform, there are very few organizations that will really benefit from them. We acknowledge that it’s a welcome change, now that enterprise-class systems are giving the importance of email archiving a nod, but the limited archiving functionality will still actually benefit very few. 

When Microsoft included archiving facilities in Exchange 2010, many IT teams rejoiced: Finally, the need to organize a third party archiving solution had been eliminated! Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case. A recent report from Osterman research has pointed out that most organizations that deploy Exchange 2010 should still consider relying on third party archiving applications for many reasons.

For the first time, Microsoft has included archiving in Exchange 2010. Research indicates that adoption of Exchange 2010 will continue to increase, so it’s definitely one of Microsoft’s more successful ventures. But now that archiving is a feature of Exchange, the use of the utility is likely to increase and so too will the idea of archiving as a best practice. Exchange 2010 enables organizations to start archiving practices themselves, and enables organizations to get to grips with compliance. Despite this, Osterman Research concludes that the majority of organizations should consider deploying a third party email archiving tool in addition to Exchange.

The adoption of email archiving is vital for highly regulated organizations, but it can also be of huge value to organizations that are not under heavy compliance burdens. In a recent report by Infotech Research Group, Jatheon was rated a champion of email archiving because of our high performance agnostic email archiving solution with it’s simple deployment for plug and go implementation. Add to this the multitude of affordable models and any size company can avail of a suitable option. So how to decide to archive, or not to archive? Here is Infotech’s run down of reasons for and against:

The hot topic among most IT professionals is eDiscovery. This is because the legal implications and obligations arising from eDiscovery law is gripping most IT departments by the throat. Companies are scrambling to get their compliance ducks in a row. Owing to this, conferences and talks are popping up right across the US and Europe, gathering those in the know with those who want to be, and spreading knowledge about how to tackle the eDiscovery problem. 

Here at Jatheon we’ve got years of experience helping SME’s to multinationals with their eDiscovery needs. It’s taught us a thing or two. While our email archiving solution provides a simple and compliant eDiscovery solution for firms, we’ve learnt about everything else that goes into the discovery process too. Here are our pearls of wisdom: 

It’s time to bring eDiscovery into the 21^st Century. And that means getting the IT department involved. No longer the realm of the legal team and a group of archive-searching interns, eDiscovery has a far more serious place at the heart of a company’s legal defense and is mostly carried out through technology- and that means the IT department is going to be deeply involved.

News over the last two weeks points to a full-blown US court case from the authorities as part of the ongoing investigation into NewsCorp and News International over phone hacking. Another round of arrests took place recently at the Sun newspaper, so we know this story is far from over. Rupert Murdoch has again flown to London at a time when the UK’s best selling newspaper is in turmoil. Employees at the paper are still angry with the NewsCorp management team who reconstructed and trawled email archives to produce evidence that led to the arrests. The archives were the subject of much controversy when their condition was ambiguous over the last few months. It raises a lot of issues; chief among them is the issue of email compliance.