Email Functions and Email Storage Management
Since its inception in 1971, email has come a long way (it practically eradicated snail mail, to begin with). It’s no longer just a quick way to ask for information or keep in touch with family and friends on the other side of the globe. Email has become the lifeblood of small businesses and enterprises alike — so much so that whole industries have been built around email storage management.
So what is it that makes email so important? What is it about email that creates a need for email storage management? First and foremost, its sheer volume. When email was invented, nobody could predict how big it would get and what applications it would have. According to a 2018 Radicati Group study, over a half of our planet uses email (3.8 billion users) and the total number of business and consumer emails exchanged daily now exceeds 281 billion. Despite the rise of social media and instant messaging platforms, 86% of professionals still name email as their favorite form of communication.
Here are some major functions of email for businesses and the reasons why email storage management is key for successful long-term business operation and corporate governance.
Discussing Business Decisions
Anyone who has ever conducted an email conversation with more than one person knows how quickly the volume of email messages in any given conversation can multiply. With so many emails saved in different folders by different users, there’s plenty of potential for chaos. A centralized email repository and backup would bring some order to this. Having all your corporate email correspondence in a single vault means that any relevant email can be found easily without having to trawl through stacks of messages.
Sharing Documents
Email is the most popular method for document sharing within companies. When you’ve created a valuable business document, it’s natural to seek feedback and share it with colleagues for collaboration. Email allows you to do this quickly and easily. But there’s an unfortunate downside — email attachments can be bulky, and that results in clogged email servers. Hosting huge volumes of documents can be a real strain on mail servers. In order to avoid overloading your systems, it’s mandatory to have some kind of email storage management.
Emails Are Official Documents
These days, many business decisions are confirmed via email. This means emails become more than just communication — they become documents in their own right. Effective email storage management is vital in ensuring that these documents don’t get deleted or shared inadvertently and that they are held securely. Stakeholders and end users often access the same document many times, and we all know how frustrating it can be when you can’t remember its name or the sender. Moreover, internal and external auditors and regulators have the right to demand your organization’s email history in case there’s a pending lawsuit or charges of fraud, embezzlement or employee misconduct. In such cases, your eDiscovery response needs to be quick.
Without a proper email storage management strategy or a dedicated email archiving solution, companies are forced to extract data manually, which takes weeks and costs a lot — some Fortune 500 companies pay $30 million for eDiscovery annually.
To learn how you can improve your email management, consider this six-step approach or schedule your personal demo to see how email archiving works in practice.
Originally published at jatheon.com on July 13, 2018.
