Practical Email optimization and archiving strategies

Practical Email optimization and archiving strategies

Email is a popular tool for messaging, calendaring, and  managing contacts along with attachments in most organizations.

Email and messaging

Given the popularity of email and diverse ways that it is used for managing various forms of unstructured data attachments including photos, video, audio, spreadsheets, presentations and other document objects, there are corresponding back end challenges. Those back end challenges including managing the data storage repositories (e.g. file systems and storage systems) that are used for preserving and serving email documents along with enabling regulatory or compliance mandates.

Email archiving is an important  enabler for regulatory compliance and e-discovery functions. However there is another  important use for E-mail archiving which as a data footprint reduction (DFR) technique and technology enables storage optimization, being green and  supporting growth while stretching budgets further. There is after all no such thing as a data or information  recession and all one has to do to verify the trend is to look at your own email activity.

Industry Trend: Data growth and demand

There are however constraints on time, budgets and demands to do more while relying on more information  and email has become a central tool for messaging including social  media networking, handling of attachments and means to manage all of that  data.

DFR enables more data to be stored, retained, managed and  maintenance in a cost effective manner. This includes storing more data managed  per person, where when the additional data being retained adds value to an  organization. Also included is keeping more data readily accessible, not  necessarily instantly accessible, however but within minutes instead of hours  or days depending on service requirements.

Data footprint reduction (DFR) techniques and technologies

Here is a link to a recent article that I did presenting  five tips and strategies for optimizing e-mail using archiving.

Hopefully many of you will find these  to be common sense tips  being implemented, however if  not, now is the time to take action to stretch your resources further to  do more.

In general email optimization tips include:

  • Set policies for retention and disposal
  • Establish filters and rules
  • Index and organize your inbox
  • Archive messages regularly
  • Perform routine cleanup and optimization
  • Leverage cloud data protection services and solutions

When it comes to archiving projects, walk before you run, establish success to build upon for  broader deployment of E-mail archiving by finding and address low hanging  fruit opportunities.

Instead of trying to do to much, find opportunities that  can be addressed and leveraged as examples to build business cases to move  forward.

By having some success stories and proof points, these  can be used to help convince management to support additional steps not to mention  getting them to back your polices to achieve success.

An effective way to convince  management these days is to show them how by taking additional Email  archiving steps you can support increased growth demand, reduce costs while  enhancing productivity not to mention adding compliance and ediscovery  capabilities as side benefits.

You can read more here and here, ok, nuff said for now.

Cheers gs

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