Most Fortune 500 companies have implemented an email archiving system to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and to ensure that their most critical business information assets are protected. Email is now the number one business communication tool, accounting for over 60% of all professional correspondence. According to Fortune Magazine, email has also become “evidence mail.” It is widely believed that the benefits of preserving all email messages now outweigh the legal risks of a failure to maintain a complete record of all correspondence in the event of litigation.

Standard back-up systems simply do not provide the functionality required to retrieve messages stored more than 30, 60 or 90 days prior. It is often prohibitively expensive to retrieve older messages on many standard “backup” systems, which do not provide a true archive. One study estimates that it takes an IT professional up to 11 hours to retrieve a single message over a year old. It is also estimated that IT professionals spend 8 hours per week backing up email systems and a further 8 hours per week retrieving emails. Depending on the size of the company and the number of IT professionals, the costs of archiving and retrieving emails can range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

An efficient email archiving system also allows an employer to implement and maintain a company-wide email use policy which allows supervisory personnel to monitor incoming and outgoing messages for inappropriate content and abuse.