3 Ways Third-party Email Archiving Is Better Than In-House Email Archiving

Because of recent developments in the political sphere, businesses are under more pressure than ever to protect their corporate records for audit and legal purposes. However, the need for compliant email archiving goes beyond politics as email management has proven to offer numerous benefits for small and large businesses alike.

Businesses who have not given third-party email archiving services much thought yet may want to think twice about saving a huge chunk of their budget to deploy their own in-house email archiving solutions. Put together side by side, here are three ways third-party email archiving has shown to be leagues ahead than in-house email archiving:

1. Sophistication of features – Email archiving has come a long way from being an unregulated industry in the late 90s to becoming one of the most important eDiscovery tasks to date. As such, the field of IT management is now seeing more and more sophisticated features that solve storage, retrieval, retention, and system reliability problems of email archiving. For instance, leading third-party email archiving vendors support wildcard, Boolean, proximity, fuzzy logic, and custom query searches that make finding certain emails faster. Email messages are also subject to the best safeguards such as SSL encryption during transit of data. Data may also be exported in a variety of formats like PST, PDF, TXT, EML, HTML, and NSF files. All in all, third-party email archiving service providers ensure they follow strict compliance for capturing, archiving, and retrieval of emails in the most efficient and effective manner as dictated by regulatory bodies both in the US and EU.
2. Support and manage their own servers – Another compelling reason why businesses should consider third-party services is the steep costs of building in-house message storage facilities. Before, email was one of the few inexpensive forms of business communication; now instant messages and social media, and mobile messages need to be archived as well. This means the demand for corporate storage will only continue to grow as more forms of business communication are discovered through evolving technologies. Many third-party vendors now provide unlimited storage – well and good as the number of business emails is seen to hit as much as 132 billion by the end of the year. Aside from servers and storage itself, businesses must also think about the costs of hiring IT personnel to operate and maintain their email archiving systems, as well as their backup and disaster recovery plans to protect data.  
3. Allow businesses to focus on revenue-generating applications – Last but not the least, hiring third party email archiving services will free up resources that businesses can use for revenue-generating applications and services instead. Email archiving is critical for businesses – there is no arguing about this – but as eDiscovery environments become more complex, businesses are better off sticking to their strengths and leave the headaches and challenges of email management to the experts.

In sum, enlisting the services of a third-party email archiving vendor simply makes better business than in-house email archiving. Businesses will find that the pros of the former far outweigh the latter’s.