In addition to providing support for core applications and solving data-related issues, IT departments are increasingly asked to deliver compliance, discovery and employee productivity solutions for electronic communications. Beyond simply retaining these business records, these solutions must enable systematic message supervision/review and the timely search/production across an ever-widening range of different content types.

“In conversations with large customers, primarily in regulated industries, Forrester frequently hears from archiving decision-makers who are ready to rethink their current archiving investment. Enterprise architects specifically ask about the vendors they perceive as innovative, those vendors with comprehensive connectors and better usability and that have options for cloud or software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment.”

-Forrester Research, Archiving Platforms Evolve Into Sources Of Insights And Corporate Memory, March 2015

Which stakeholders are asking IT for these solutions?

We’re seeing three primary stakeholders engaging IT to gain business intelligence, manage risk and increase productivity through the use of archived electronic message content.

Compliance Teams

Require retention and oversight solutions to meet changing and expanding regulatory requirements for all of the different forms of electronic communications in use today (email, text and instant messages, web, video and various social media channels).

Legal Teams

Need to investigate real-time and respond quickly and completely when asked to search and produce specific messages related to discovery events such as audits, examinations and litigation.

Employees

Desire the ability to quickly and easily search and take action on older emails that are no longer stored in their inbox. The need for immediate access to older emails can occur at any time, requiring mobile enabled, self-service solutions. Having this capability mitigates many issues related to mailbox quota limits/capacities and facilitates the use of critical business knowledge and insights available in archived emails and attachments, benefiting both IT and the employees they support.

What role can comprehensive archiving play in creating a solution?

Many IT departments may not be aware that comprehensive archiving technology is designed to address these challenges. Rather, they may be looking to extend their core applications, data systems, utilities, and processes as a solution. Comprehensive archiving technology provides different and specialized capabilities not found in the backup, retention and uptime systems that IT typically manages.

Collaboration between IT and project stakeholders increases as a result of IT leveraging the capabilities of comprehensive archiving, and its adoption accelerates and expands based on its ability to address these specific challenges head on.

What are the benefits to IT?

Deploying next-generation comprehensive archiving solutions allows IT to stay focused on critical systems, applications and data projects. They can use the technology’s specialized functionality to meet the unique and specific requirements that are critical to compliance and legal teams, as well as employees who need immediate access to their historical email. Additionally, a cloud-based comprehensive archiving platform can be fast to deploy, cost-effective and may eliminate one-off/silo solutions if it offers support for a wide range of content types and workflow options designed for specific use-cases.

Learn more about The Archiving Platform from Smarsh at www.smarsh.com/archiving-and-compliance/.