Why Use Webroot Email Archiving Software as a Service?

It is estimated that over 80% of a user's business data is stored in their email files and folders after 1 years use. Users rely on email today as a key business application and deleted or misplaced email may be required for many reasons, compliance, litigation, internal investigation or simply to aid the user in their day to day business.

Four challenges exist in solving this business requirement:

• How to easily store copies of all emails with integrity, accuracy and in a secure manner in a best practise fault tolerant, multiple location and off site manner
• How to ensure easy and fast retrieval of emails if and when required, both by the business and the individual user in a self serve manner
• Making sure all of this business critical data is secure, tamper free and searches are audited
• That the solution is easy and rapid to deploy, offers easy ongoing management and is delivered in a cost effective manner

The sheer growth in email volumes, growing storage rates, larger and more file attachments, numerous mailboxes and multiple access points, are all adding to the complexity behind managing email for most companies.

Changes in law and best practices are also causing organisations to re-think email archiving needs. Retention policies are lengthening, rapid discovery/recovery is becoming a standard requirement and everyone is struggling to keep up with ballooning email stores.

• 25.2% were ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee email in the last year. (Forrester Consulting)
• The survey found that 58 per cent of UK businesses would suffer significant business disruption if their IT systems were not available for one day (PricewaterhouseCoopers)
• 40%+ of emails at work are non-business related (IDC research)
• 24% of companies have experienced their employees' email being subpoenaed and 15% have gone to court because of lawsuits brought on by their employees' email. (American Management Association)

Put simply, businesses which consider that their Email system may contain valuable business data should be ensuring that they not only backup the data, but also follow best practise and take those backups offsite, which is crucial for true business disaster recovery and business continuity. A recent survey from Price Waterhouse identified that 70 of UK business do daily general data backups, but according to other studies only 14% of corporate emails are archived (Radicati 2007). Backing up email on a daily basis for network and mobile users, internal and external email in a simplified off site manner has not been viewed as easy, despite the growing need to do so.

The options you have are:

Do Nothing - This is no longer a realistic option given the amount of business critical data in the distributed email store and the growing requirements to be able to retrieve information quickly for both litigation and business purposes.

On Network Email Archiving solution - These solutions result in overly complicated, expensive, and difficult to maintain systems that leave many archiving problems unsolved. Involving the purchase of both the separate software and hardware required for it to operate. This option demands for software and hardware to be purchased, installed, configured and maintained at the highest possible levels by the customer. Any failure of the product will leave the customer to resolve any resulting issues.

A more appropriate option for modern business web usage exists: The Managed Service.

Webroot Email Archiving service

The Webroot archiving solution has been designed so that organisations can not only meet the strictest compliance requirements, but exceed them for greater benefit. Secure storage and indexing of data with real-time data replication means that legal discovery requirements are met and that organisations can effortlessly retrieve business critical information at any time.

In addition to the capture and archive of boundary SMTP e-mail passing through the Webroot Managed Service, the solution is also able to capture internal mail traffic sent through mail servers such as Exchange, Lotus Notes and other SMTP based mail servers.

Internal Messages are routed from the mail systems of an organisation to Webroot's managed archiving service. The message lifecycle is then managed according to your business defined policies. Email and attachments are indexed, encrypted and stored on highly secure servers in resilient and redundant storage infrastructure within multiple data centres.

The services have redundancy, availability and disaster recovery built-in, saving you the resource and costs of unplanned or planned downtime. To achieve this yourself with an on network solution will prove far more costly and complex.