Are UK businesses archiving emails securely?

Categories: CNC News

Properly archiving all emails is now imperative to avoid companies losing vital information.
IT experts across the South East are regularly contacted by businesses who have had emails deleted or tampered with and are now facing a big problem.

“We’ve had clients where an employee leaves and innocently, or deliberately, deletes all his emails and so destroys key information about sales or customer service issues,” explained IT consultant Gary Jowett from the Shoreham-based IT managed services company CNC. “Having an archiving service which stores all your emails on UK servers located remotely from your own premises means you can always find essential correspondence even if someone deletes it from their computer.”

The solution is a remote storage solution such as Mimecast which is both highly secure and very responsive. It uses UK-based servers which is essential for many organisations who are required by law to store customer and other data within the European Union.

Can archiving reduce financial risks?

Mimecast also supports your business when your email server fails. A web-based email can be quickly accessed enabling emails to be sent, received and retrieved from archives while your office server is being fixed.

For around £60 +VAT a year per user — or £1,250 +VAT for an organisation up to 25 users — Mimecast could, potentially, save significant sums of money in terms of customer revenues and by preserving vital evidence when a contractual dispute or employee tribunal occurs.
Gary explained: “Historic Emails can be tampered with but, if your business has a remote archive system in place, it will retain the original version of the email should there ever be any dispute with a supplier, customer or employee. For a relatively low annual outlay, subscribing to Mimecast can therefore save a company many thousands of pounds should the unthinkable happen.”

There are a number of other advantages which IT consultants advise their customers to consider. For example, remote archiving reduces your overall IT costs by avoiding overloaded servers at your premises and by eradicating complex in-house back-up and restoration processes for email.
Mimecast also means no more mailbox quotas to worry about. Users won’t receive any more warning messages to delete emails just when they need to send that all-important document to a customer.

Regrettably and to enormous cost, many companies in the South East and London still wait until a major loss of data occurs before realising the value of remote email archiving.

The good news is that experienced IT consultants based in Sussex, Kent and Hampshire, are now helping South Coast organisations to reduce significant financial risks by installing remote archiving as an integral part of the managed services they offer.