Email is a primary digital identity of everybody using mobile and web applications and is also a medium of choice for notifications, communications, alerts and with progressive digitization, this volume of Email transacted by each user continues to grow.

It is estimated that a single user will transact 129 email in a day by 2019, which means that on average each business user will grow their mailbox by 4GB annually, year on year.

Thus, for any IT Team across the globe, managing bloating email boxes of their users, is a top concern, which cannot be addressed by throwing more resources at this problem:

• Larger mailboxes means more load on the server and on the client devices as email clients (mobile and desktop) need to continually download and sync mail from the servers to maintain a consistent and uniform mailbox state across all devices.
• Backup of such large mailboxes could take up substantial time and resources and could also impact service performance during the backup runs.
• All this also increases cost of the infrastructure and operations as more storage needs to be deployed along with proportionate backup devices.

One of the best practices we recommend, to mitigate this concern, is to adopt a tiered or hierarchical storage architecture, where the hot store (primary mail store on the live email platform) has frequently used email for a shorter period of time, and the warm/cold store has the earlier and less frequently used mail.

This is best achieved by deploying a cloud email archiving tool to ensure that all the email are safely recorded in an alternate separate platform, accessible on demand, and secured by tamper proof controls.

Once this is in place:

You can now safely delete mail from the live mailboxes and only maintain recent mail, e.g. only mail of last 3 months. This can also be done by a retention policy, supported by most popular mailing platforms. This now improves mail server and email client performance many fold. If users need to access their older email, they simply login to the archival self service portal and search for their email.

Smaller, leaner mail storage on the server also means less to backup and less to manage, substantially impacting cost and productivity.

As a side benefit, since users now have access to ALL of their email from the self service portal, they can help themselves locate historical or lost email, run deep ediscovery searches to find hidden knowledge pieces and download those email if required, all of which contributes to improved productivity.

Storing email in 3 tiers, across Hot, Warm, and Cold stores, based on the frequency of access, can improve mail server performance by a high order. Email archiving is a critical piece in the IT landscape of an organisation to help achieve this.

“By 2019, 75% of organizations will treat archived data as an active and “nearline” data source, and not simply as a separate repository to be viewed or searched periodically, up from less than 10% today.” – Gartner

Stay tuned for more in the best practice series of blogs from the desk of our experts.