Best Practices: Email Archiving

With so many vendors now offering products for email archiving, getting beyond the hype to what you really need is becoming more and more of a challenge. Many of these tools were created for financial services companies dealing with compliance regulations, but they are now being adopted by the rest of the marketplace. Much of the functionality is overkill, and many firms are getting tangled up in the complexity of these products. We talked with archiving users as well as leading vendors and professional services organizations to narrow down the essential best practices in this field. Smart companies use four key strategies to succeed with email archiving: They rightsize the infrastructure; walk through eDiscovery scenarios ahead of time; consider archiving other data types besides just email; and staff and manage the archive for the long term.