Email archiving has grown in popularity in the last fifteen years and is now a multi-billion dollar market. It has evolved from an essential on-premises product for highly regulated industries to mainstream adoption in the cloud. For organisations replacing or deploying new archiving solutions today there are many choices of technology and product.
Email archiving is not just for highly regulated industries
Email archiving was once a technology that only companies in highly regulated industries adopted. As part of a wider information governance framework, it enables these companies to adhere to legislation and regulations that are applicable to their industry.
Today email archiving is moving into the mainstream. Organisations of all sizes recognise that adopting similar best practices to those of regulated companies helps achieve significant benefits around operational excellence, which can lead to competitive advantage. Also, the regulatory environment is widening. For example, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will impact any organisation, anywhere, that processes the personal information of EU subjects. To react in a timely manner to subject access requests, tools provided by email archiving are a necessity for all organisations.
Email archiving reduces email management overhead
Email archiving helps reduce the costs associated with email management. Mailbox size and quota management are primarily a concern for organisations with on-premises email servers, but even for those that have moved to hosted email, archiving still brings significant benefits.
Email archiving provides self-service capabilities for not only the legal and GRC teams, but every end-user. This removes the burden of user support from IT helpdesks and email administrators, allowing them to focus on tasks that are more important while users become more productive. Helpdesks no longer take calls asking for deleted emails to be recovered and role-based permissions permit email administrators to easily assign the correct access levels to legal, GRC and human resources personnel.
Cloud enables wider adoption
For email archiving to enjoy wider adoption, deployment and management has to be simple and cost-effective. According to analyst firm Gartner, 70% of new or replacement email archiving solutions are SaaS. This reflects the general trend of moving to the cloud to reduce operational complexity and realise a low total cost of ownership.
The trend towards migrating email to the cloud continues apace, so it should not be a surprise that the email archive is also moving to the cloud. Once the decision is made to deploy cloud-based archiving, the next decision is who best to purchase from.
Choosing the right archiving provider
There are three vendor options for organisations deciding to purchase email archiving:
- A dedicated archiving specialist
- A hosted email provider such as Microsoft
- An email security and management provider
Dedicated archiving specialists may be the right choice for those looking to archive many different types of data in addition to email, or those who require functionality related to a specific vertical industry. Although caution should be exhibited, as much of this specialized functionality may have come from acquisitions and not be fully integrated, resulting in a patchwork solution that is no easier to manage than multiple best-of-breed products.
The majority of hosted email providers also offer email archiving, along with email security services. They compete with the final category of email archiving provider, which typically started life as an email security provider and diversified to offer a complete email management platform.
Organisations gain significant benefits from purchasing multiple services from a single provider. Commercial benefits include product bundle pricing and simplified procurement through a single point of contact for billing and contract negotiation. Technology benefits include integration of management interfaces and a single point of delivery and support, resulting in quick resolution of technical problems.
Industry lost focus, email protection languished
Some years ago, the Internet threat landscape shifted and web became the primary vector for threat delivery. This resulted in the commoditization of the email security market, and many email security providers were forced to diversify their portfolio into a number of parallel service areas like archiving. They quickly realised that, by focusing on archiving, they could make more money and increase switching costs for their customers, tying them in with high data extraction fees.
This change of focus resulted in email security being neglected, and today, with the majority of threats switching back to the email channel, many of these services do not offer adequate protection. Protection of users, information and ultimately your organisation’s reputation and stock price should be the highest priority. There is little point in archiving emails that contain threats, exacerbating the email security problem.
Choose Cyren
With a unified security cloud blocking over 300 million transactions daily, Cyren is focused on protection first, but recognise that our customers wish to obtain the benefits outlined above. By purchasing email archiving from Cyren our customers enjoy these benefits, plus the best protection, delivered on a single platform by cloud security experts.
To find out more, register for the live webinar Now is the time to revisit your email archiving needs.