The first task of an email archiving solution is to capture the complete set of business records—messages that contain information “required in the company’s day-to-day decision making, financial and business analysis, forecasting and reporting, customer service, resource management, compliance with state and federal laws and regulation, and legal interests”.

Business cannot function without email.With over 40% of users checking their email every few minutes , IT managers have had to improve the availability and speed of their messaging platforms, as well as manage increasing email volumes. Email has also emerged as the de facto information management platform, which presents a serious business challenge: although email systems excel at quickly distributing information, most simply fail at reliably storing and providing immediate access to the 83% of business-critical data that they now contain. Surprisingly, the massive investment in enterprise knowledge and document management applications over the past decade has done little to address this challenge.

In addition to being a core business function, expedient access to an organization’s knowledge capital found in email messages is also a matter of legal and regulatory compliance. Some regulations require indefinite retention of certain types of data, and organizations without proper tools to store and retrieve critical information contained in emails now routinely face either escalating retrieval costs or severe compliance fines.