Email Archiving: in-house solution or outsourced service? [part 1]
February 15, 2008 at 10:10 pm (Email Archiving, archive email, business, data retention, electronic communication, electronic data discovery, electronic document retention, email audit, email backup, email compliance, email management, email retention, email security, message archiving, news, politics, thoughts)
In this entry I would like to focus on the cost of an in-house email archiving solution versus that of an outsourced service. Firstly, which one is more cost efficient? This question is an important one for most small to mid-sized businesses as they need to keep email archiving within a tight IT budget. Organizations will be pleased to know that the answer is an outsourced service, and it is usually by a significant amount. But why? Why are in-house solutions so much more expensive? It all comes down to the sheer amount of work that is required to keep the in-house solution up and running. The IT team is responsible for monitoring all incoming and outgoing electronic communications, maintaining email archiving appliances, and ensuring proper systems integration. There is also the issue of storage space, which could add up in a hurry if your business has thousands of emails entering and leaving the archive daily. Outsourced services retain all of your email messages for you and present you with advanced search options to quickly retrieve specific emails that have been captured in the archive. However, the big question that I am posing here is: are there any distinct advantages to an in-house email archiving solution that would justify the high cost to maintain and integrate? Why do some organizations PREFER the higher cost?
In one word, the answer is trust. Companies simply do not feel comfortable trusting an outsourced email archiving service to sift through their email and have access to private information. But is that really what happens? Do email archiving services take such advantage of their clients? No, they don’t. Why not, you might ask? Roles based permission access, industry regulation authorities, and business reputation are three critical factors that ensure outsourced email archiving safety. Are there any distinct advantages to an in-house email archiving solution that would justify the high cost to maintain and integrate? There are some loose arguments to be made in favor of an in-house solution, but stay tuned for part II for more information.
