Why Dedicated Email Archiving Is Crucial for Your Business

 

Our QuickTip from December 17th discussed the problems many small businesses experience firsthand when they use the archiving feature within Microsoft Outlook. Contrary to its name, “archiving” within Outlook doesn’t truly “archive” emails. When you use the archiving feature within Outlook, performance is still sluggish — think of sweeping the dirt under the rug and now you have the picture.

What you really need to do is clean up your Outlook .pst files without losing your ability to quickly retrieve important emails and find the information you want when you need it. You need on-demand access and guaranteed continuity. Don’t settle for anything less, no matter how easy it might seem.

Protecting the communication lifeblood of your company isn’t always a slam-dunk.
Yahoo Mail suffered a three-day email outage in early December that affected approximately one million users, rankled the tech media, and even prompted Yahoo’s high-profile CEO, Marissa Mayer, to publicly apologize for the “unacceptable” and “massive inconvenience.”

A classic email outage isn’t the only problem that small business owners endure. Consider these five aggravating situations:

• Looking for that critical email or attachment you know you sent years ago but can’t locate? You can have years of crucial business correspondence in your Outlook folders. How do you find the exact email you need to answer a client question?

• Ever lose a contract, know that you have an electronic version, but cannot find the email containing the attachment? It’s not unusual for a business owner to spend thirty minutes looking for a single email. But the attachments to emails can be of utmost importance.

• Need to answer an auditor’s question? For small business owners in the health care, legal, financial, and government contracting markets, you know how painful it can be to tell the auditor that you “know you have that email somewhere.” Sadly, this embarrassing situation can be the start of a tsunami of follow-up questions, each requiring additional deep dives into poorly archived emails.

• Your internal email server crashes or your external email provider goes down. Now all of your clients receive “sender undeliverable” bounce-back messages, and your phone starts ringing off the hook. When you rely on making a professional impression with your clients, you cannot afford to have email outages — or, worse yet, to have it appear as though you, your employees, or your business are “out of business.”

• Ever wonder what would happen if you suffered a complete email mailbox catastrophe? A mailbox corrupted beyond repair? What would that mean to your business?

Reliance on email has grown exponentially over the last 10 years, and with that growth comes the need to ensure uninterrupted operation and archival preservation of critical communication. Given the wide array of mail clients and applications, there’s always room for error, though, making a service like CMIT RADAR (Rapid Access, Discovery, Archiving, and Recovery) one that every business should explore.

Email archiving saves time, increases productivity, and enhances security. If you’d like to put those benefits to work for your company, call or email CMIT Solutions today.