Email backup is not the same as email archiving. They’re different, and solve very different problems.
Email backup stores your emails when your email server goes down by providing you a backup email server. In this manner, email backup is a very important part of business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR). That’s the problem it solves. If something goes wrong with your email server, you won’t lose any emails.
Email servers can go offline for any number of reasons including down Internet, server reboot, software patching or server failure. How many emails will you miss if your mail server is offline for an hour? A day?
What’s key to email backup is to make sure the backup server is in a different geographical location than the primary server. That is BC/DR best practices. One simple way to ensure that is to use cloud-based email backup. That way, the backup server is in a different location whether you’re using your own on-premises equipment or a hosted solution like Office 365 or G Suite.
Features to look for in email backup include the following:
- Automatically failover
- Unlimited storage of email and attachments
- Long-term storage like 30 days
- Automatic redelivery after the primary server comes back on line
- Seamless integration to hosted solutions
- TLS encryption
- Up and running in 10 minutes
Email archiving, on the other hand is about compliance: legal, regulatory and policy. In that manner, it supports compliance audits. That’s the problem it solves.
Email archiving solves the problem by accomplishing three objectives: 1) it stores emails, 2) it ensures the emails haven’t been altered and 3) it makes emails easy to find with sophisticated search capability.
There are many kinds of audits for which companies are responsible. These include SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PII and industry-specific audits. Email archiving can also be used to safeguard intellectual property.
Features to look for in email archiving include the following:
- Cloud-based infrastructure to avoid equipment purchases
- Immutable WORM-compliant storage
- Authenticated user access
- Role-based permissions
- Unlimited concurrent searches
- No search timeouts
- Seamless integration to hosted solutions
- Up and running in 10 minutes
If you want to make sure you never lose a single email to server downtime, get email backup. If you want to make sure you can quickly and easily meet all your compliance audits, get email archiving. If you want to do both, please check the details here.