The two functions have different names for a reason. Think of them as a filing system and a library. A filing system without anywhere to store the neatly catalogued files would not prove very useful. Equally, a library without a filing system would be total chaos!

One cannot exist without the other. Email backup and archiving work together in the same way. Having both solutions in place ensures your business is able to demonstrate the necessary process and due diligence.

This article looks at the difference between email archiving and email backup and explains why it is important for your business to have both in place.

Email backup (the filing system)

Email backup is the process of backing up emails to a server. It ensures that emails can be recovered in a read-only, unaltered format.

This is required for businesses to comply with national and industry regulations.

It also serves to assist with business continuity in the event of a lost or compromised device. Email backup is also beneficial in other use cases such as keeping a record of employees’ emails to customers in the event that they leave the business.

Email archiving (the library)

Email archiving keeps all messages and attachments in their original state. This makes it possible to quickly retrieve and recover emails in an unmodified format. The ability to search for a particular filename or text within a file makes it possible to quickly locate whatever is needed.

This is especially important to satisfy regulations and legal investigations. A good example of this is the GDPR. This requires organisations to notify the ICO of the extent of a data breach within 72 hours of it taking place.

The breach notification must contain information such as the categories of personal data records that have been compromised. It must also contain an overview of the measures that will be taken to deal with the breach and mitigate its effects.

The importance of backup and archiving in this situation

In the event that the breach was an email phishing attack, running a robust email backup and archiving programme will mean that clear and decisive action can be taken. Running regular incremental data backups enables businesses to quickly revert back to the closest recovery point.

Not having an email archiving solution in place in the event of a GDPR investigation will cause problems. The business needs to be able to demonstrate, quickly, that there is a robust process in place for capturing, storing and restoring data.

To do so requires faster access to data than backup alone can provide. In the event of a breach and investigation, IT and legal teams need to be able to quickly locate and e-discover the required files.

Going back to the library and filing system, imagine trying to quickly locate documents for a legal investigation in a library that had no filing system. Although it may sound like an exaggeration, this is what IT teams without an adequate email archiving system would face in the event of an investigation.