How-To Select An E-Mail Archiving Solution

Though many businesses have identified the need for an e-mail archiving solution, it's crucial that business and IT decision makers identify relevant business drivers and build an implementation strategy that ensures vendor offerings meet business goals.

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Adapted from Info-Tech Research Note:
E-Mail Archiving: Build That Better Mousetrap

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Businesses everywhere are concerned with issues such as the expense of defending themselves in lawsuits, demonstrating regulatory compliance, solving e-mail performance issues, and implementing governance initiatives. For help, businesses are turning to e-mail archiving solutions that promise to simplify e-discovery, demonstrate e-mail regulatory conformity, offload archives from production e-mail servers, and automate business-determined retention periods.

Right now, four approaches dominate the e-mail archiving market and it's important to understand the differences before considering a vendor.

• Hosted Solutions -- Hosted e-mail archiving providers capture e-mail before it reaches a businesses' mail server. Because e-mail is archived off-site, these services also provide a measure of disaster recovery. Examples include MessageOne and Postini Message Archiving.
• On-Premises Solution -- On-site e-mail archiving servers may also archive IM, and may have sister products that handle disk/file archiving. This class of solution began by focusing on archiving e-mail rather than document collaboration. Market leaders include Symantec Enterprise Vault and EMC EmailXtender.
• Records/Document Management Solutions (R/DMS) -- R/DMS products usually allow e-mail to be manually ingested into the R/DMS. However, most vendors are now offering additional functionality in the form of e-mail archiving modules such as the Open Text Livelink ECM module or Documentum IRM Client for E-mail.
• Archiving Appliances -- E-mail archiving appliances provide a drop-in solution that requires minimal setup or ongoing maintenance. Examples include the Barracuda Message Archiver and MPC MailFrame.

Next Page: The First Step Toward Selecting an Archiving Solution

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