When a lot of individuals really think regarding} archiving, they picture an email archive appliance – a locally-installed hardware solution focused on archiving emails using a mail product offering Outlook.
While an email archive was once seen as the ideal alternative for email archiving, the environment has changed and there are now numerous email archiving products available. It pays to assess} each choice to determine which is best and most for the demands of your organization.
Email Archiving Options
You will find 4 alternatives readily available for archiving email to satisfy your compliance obligations:
- A specific physical email archiving server or appliance
- Software for email archiving
- A cloud-based email archiving service
- A hybrid solution combining 2 or more of the above
Advantages/Disadvantages of an email Archiving Appliance
An email archiving appliance is among the simplest of email archiving options. You purchase an actual appliance which works as a standalone unit for email archiving and it is housed alongside your servers on site. The sole goal of the equipment is archiving emails. With an email archiving appliance there’s an one-time price} to acquire the hardware, along with continuous maintenance expenses. Physical email archiving devices are robust, but backups continue to be necessary in case of appliance failure. You would thus have to factor in backup storage expenses.
An alternative option is using a virtual appliance. A virtual system is provided as a purpose built virtual option that’s ready and pre-configured to deploy in the virtual environment, on HyperV or VMware for instance. Both email archiving appliance choices are ready and pre-configured deployed. Getting established requires around an hour, as well as you are able to typically get everything set up in one morning.
Virtual and physical appliances are very easy to use and deploy, simple to secure, and will give you peace of mind as your vital email information will be kept in-house. If ever there’s an issue, you are going to have straightforward access to the appliance. Security is simple, as the equipment could be configured to simply be accessible from inside your organization’s network and often will be screened by your organization’s firewall.
Cloud email archiving is quickly becoming the accepted standard. With a cloud based archive, all archiving occurs} in the cloud and the solution is offered} as a service. Your provider is going to provide the software program, databases, and cloud storage and often will guarantee that the archive is 100% secured as well as backed up. There will be no maintenance requirements or even associated charges with a cloud based archiving solution.