Why should email accounts be archived?

Data archiving refers to the process of moving data that is no longer actively used to a different storage device for long-term retention. Archiving email accounts is a systematic approach for saving and protecting email data and for enabling data retrieval when needed.

When an employee leaves the company, the IT department must change the user status to inactive. Additionally, they must follow the company's retention policy that defines whether the user’s data will be kept for a period of time or delete it. 

Archiving email accounts enables end-users and employees to access old email messages quickly and to preserve valuable information. 

Archiving emails is highly recommended for the following reasons:

1. ‍Storage cost reduction. Archiving is usually based on a low-performance, high-capacity storage medium, therefore reducing costs. An archiving system can compress data to reduce overall email storage drastically. When choosing to archive email messages with a cloud service provider - such as ArkiveBox -  the company can pay a low-cost subscription because the cloud provider maintains the service and security needed.‍
2. Regulatory Compliance. Every industry sector has to adhere to specific regulations regarding data security and retention. While some sectors require less compliance obligations, other sectors such as financial services, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals face very strict regulations that could lead to significant penalties and fines when violated.
3. ‍Protection and litigation support. Any organization may get involved in a legal investigation. Litigation discovery is a process known as retrieving and submitting data upon request.  If the company does not archive its email data, the cost of recovering data for a legal proceeding may be as financially damaging as the litigation itself. Also, the company must be able to access documentation in the event of a compliance audit, business investigation, or other matters that can transpire.
4. ‍Intellectual property protection. Old emails can provide a large amount of intelligence regarding your company. Intellectual property rights concern the relationship between ownership and usage of that data. Using an email archive can leverage insights and data analytics from the past to keep the business moving forward.

When choosing an email archiving system, the company must ensure the solution provides automation to prevent the archiving process from becoming tedious and time-consuming.  It should also consider where the information will be stored to grant data security.

One of ToogleBox's services, ArkiveBox, is an archiving service for Google Workspace email accounts. ArkiveBox is a low-cost and simpler alternative to other archiving services that provides your business a solution to preserve valuable information and enables a process to quickly recover the data when needed.