Due to the critical importance to business of e-mail and messaging, both backup and archiving are vital in ensuring disaster recovery and legal regulatory compliance.
So says Martin Tassev, MD of Loophold Security Distribution, who points out that e-mail and instant messaging have become a vital part of everyday life and business workings.
Paul Lawrence, regional sales director, UK, Nordics and MEA, at Barracuda Networks, concurs, saying e-mail storage and management have become important issues in the business space.
“Most people now understand that having a backup of data such as e-mails is desirable in case of technology failure. However, because a large proportion of business communication takes place via this medium, archiving also becomes necessary to store data for legal purposes,” says Lawrence.
A recent ITWeb survey revealed that, to ensure the integrity, availability and security of data, the majority of organisations (43.62%) trust multiple backups.
However, Lawrence notes that e-mail backup and archiving are not the same thing, and are, in fact, two separate technologies, both of which are necessary in today's business world.
He explains that backup is designed to restore and index a snapshot of data at a certain point in time, by creating a copy of the primary data source. E-mail backup can happen both at the individual message level and at the server level, both of which are important for disaster recovery, he adds.
“This means that backup alone, while important for disaster recovery, does not meet organisational compliance objectives with regard to legislation such as the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act,” he argues.
Tassev further explains that archiving is designed to save data for an extended period of time and to index it for easy search and retrieval. He adds that an archiving solution ensures each e-mail that is sent or received is captured and stored for retrieval, should this be necessary.
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