Cloud computing has disrupted traditional on-premise e-mail archiving, paving the way for interactive archiving.
This is the view of Grant Hodgkinson, product director for unified e-mail management at Mimecast, who says e-mail is still the dominant form of communication in businesses today.
"The interactive archive is a technology platform that fulfils two important business objectives," says Hodgkinson. "Firstly, it archives content and data relevant to the organisation so that it can be discovered for compliance purposes later. Secondly, it is accessible to knowledge workers, generally making them more productive."
According to Mimecast, interactive archiving, driven by the cloud, is a more useful and valuable platform for business users as it allows them to leverage the archive and data therein for business intelligence, end-user productivity, ubiquitous access, and the corporate governance and compliance requirements that underpin the archive itself.
Hodgkinson believes the interactive archive is entirely relevant, and this is only going to grow. "As companies strive to do more with less, the demands placed on human resources will continue to grow, meaning employees need to do more with less. Leveraging technology effectively is the only way people will be able to deliver."
The interactive archive is able to solve these issues, without the knowledge worker having to search for information for hours on end, explains Hodgkinson. "Companies face several challenges in this arena - that of data sprawl, integrity and information discovery," he says, describing the challenges organisations face regarding e-mail archiving.
"Regarding data integrity, companies run the risk that their e-mail archives are incomplete or have been tampered with. Even when stored in a single archive, some vendors delete archived data when an employee leaves the organisation. While this may be sufficient, or even appropriate, for operational reasons, it is simply inappropriate when considered in an e-discovery context. Also, certain archives allow administrators to delete content, compromising the evidentiary weight of e-mail in the archive."
Archived data that is difficult to search for frustrates administrators and end-users and stifles information discovery objectives, he concludes.
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