Everyone agrees:  Email is critical to business.

With so many solutions available for email back-up, how do you know that you have the right one(s) in place?   Let’s talk about two different solutions that often get confused with each other or completely mistaken as being one and the same:  Email Archiving and Email Continuity.

Compliance legislation and legal discovery rules are requiring companies in certain industries, like Health Care and Financial Services to retain electronic documents, including email, for specific periods of time leading many companies in search of an archiving solution that will keep them compliant while easy to use and implement.   All companies need to create and follow their own document retention policies.  Unless you fall into one of the specifically regulated industries, you should have a written policy in place which specifies how long you will retain copies of email messages, and automatically enforce that policy.  You should consult your legal counsel as to what your policy should be.  They will also make sure you have appropriately documented your policy.  Once you have a clear and reasonable policy in place, then companies like MxToolBox can help you implement a solution that will support your company’s policy.

Many companies like having an off-site back up of their email even if it is not required by law.   A SaaS based archiving solution will free up the server from having to maintain all those messages while holding them safe at a second location.  Furthermore, messages are easily retrieved as a result of the advanced search capabilities.  While archiving has many advantages, sometimes a quick and easy continuity solution is enough.

Like Archiving, Email Continuity keeps a copy of your mail in the cloud but usually for a much shorter period of time.  It is  accessible to all users through a web client.  Think tornado shelter:  The sirens go off (i.e. natural disaster, your server takes an unexpected lunch) and everyone knows where to go.  Employees can send and receive mail seamlessly to their recipients.
MxToolBox’s continuity solution, Emergency Mail, is always on and keeps a 30 day rolling history of your mail so that employee productivity is never compromised.  All continuity solutions are not created equal.  For example, some are only point forward and require that you “push the red button” to implement them.

Email Continuity is not just for emergencies.  We have customers who use our Emergency Mail for easy web access to their email when they travel or work from home.  IT Administrators use it for scheduled server maintenance in addition to having it in case of emergency.

While both solutions offer safe keeping of your email in the cloud, they are quite different from each other in both purpose and design.  At MxToolbox, we make sure we understand the customers’ needs before before offering a solution.

January Newsletter:  The Big Picture for 2011 Security Trends