Government Email Archiving Compliance
Governmental institutions, from local entities to state and federal government agencies, are under pressure to retrieve emails under “Open Record or Meeting Laws” or “Sunshine Laws.” Emails are classified as official government communications and are considered public records, meaning all emails must be archived, accessible and retained for future use to ensure compliance and government transparency requirements.
Challenge #1: Storage Management
Due to our dependence upon email, there is no wonder that email stores have experienced exponential growth in the past few years. Many of mail stores have grown to a point that data restorations have become prohibitively time-consuming and difficult. This has a direct effect on an  IT organization and its ability to back-up the network on a regular basis. IT departments are now being forced to offload email to personal archives or PST files, consuming network storage.
Challenge #2: Increased Number eDiscovery Requests
- Volume of email increases on a daily basis for all industries
- Requires quick response times from agencies and government offices
- eDiscovery requirements are becoming better known, significant risk for government agencies to respond to requests
Challenge #3 – Limited Resources
For IT departments to manage and store an organization’s email storage system, there is a certain budget and amount of resources to be allocated to IT. However, the government budget cut backs leave little money and resources for companies to run a service that can store a database of an entire organization’s data. If email continues to grow, your organization will suffer from increased pressure on infrastructure to store these terabytes of information.
The Solution
Public sector organizations are increasingly looking towards hosted email archiving services like Sonian Archive Service to address all these challenges.
- Capture all emails for email retention and provide multiple layers of secure access for legal administrators and search users to comply with discovery requests.
- Provide end users with access their historical mail through the archive for day to day knowledge management, but more importantly business continuity in the event of an mail server failure
- Allow end users with proper permissions to process their own personal archives or PST files into the archive service, eliminating the need for special migration projects or fees.
- Help the management of storage growth and restrictions on the mail servers and network shares allowing for shorter, more frequent backups and quicker restoration times.
The Benefits
Improved Storage Management and Data Access
Sonian Archive SA2 addresses the organization’s storage management requirements in two primary ways. First, by providing end users with access to their historical email through the archive. This allows the IT department to enforce tighter email quotas on the mail server, reducing the storage burden, and making it easier to manage and back-up the email server. Additionally, the archive allows for the restriction of local archives and PST files, relieving not only network storage resources but numerous help desk calls.
A hidden benefit is for those common requests from end users who have deleted emails from their mailboxes. No longer is the email administrators tasked with accessing this lost email since they already have access to their archives.
Finally, due to the large number of transient staff members found within educational organizations, accessing past emails easily allow permanent staff members to maintain a level of business continuity.
Easy to Use
The Sonian Archive performs a full-text index on all emails and attachments and maintains this index, along with all associated emails on online storage. Unlike other archive vendors, most of whom migrate your older data offline or to a near-line storage system in order to keep their costs low. But with Sonian, all data is always kept online readily accessible for searches.
Sonian’s full web-based user interface is intuitive for all skill set levels, especially for those outside of IT department who typically would be performing email searches and discovery. Though Sonian does provide extensive self-service online training videos to guide users through all tasks.
Quick Setup and Near Zero Maintenance
Sonian Archive is a 100% hosted service requiring no installation of hardware or software. The average public sector organization with 1,500 mailboxes can be fully configured, capturing email and performing discovery search requests in less than 24 hours.
The Sonian Archive is offered on a low cost per mailbox/month charge with unlimited storage. Since it is offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) with no hardware or software licenses to buy, there are no capital outlay requirements.
Finally, with unlimited storage included in the mailbox cost/month your organization eliminates the unknowns found with other solutions with unexpected storage growth or manipulation of email retention policies to maintain within budget requirements.
