Google Message Archiving Administration Guide - Manual (Page 11)

12 Message Archiving Administration Guide
Why Archive Email Messages?
Your company may have several reasons for archiving email messages. The
following are some of the most common reasons for establishing a message
archiving policy:
• Business continuity and disaster recovery: Organizations require secure
long-term storage of email communications, which have become key
business assets. With an archiving solution, an organization can continue to
access its complete message record even when its mail servers or local data
systems become unavailable.
• Regulatory and compliance requirements: Governmental agencies, such
as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other regulatory
organizations, have established requirements for message retention,
accessibility, and security. To be in compliance, organizations must establish
archiving systems to retain electronic communications and assure that
requested materials can be retrieved and presented in a timely manner.
• Legal discovery and investigations: Organizations must be able to retrieve
relevant messages in the event of legal discovery, audits, and business or
personnel investigations. An archiving solution assures that evidentiary-
quality records are systematically stored in a central repository, and with
security in place to guard against issues of tampering.
• Storage management: As the volume of messages continues to increase, an
archiving solution lets organizations offload message storage from their
corporate servers. This reduction in stored messages helps to ensure that
server performance is maintained, minimizes storage costs, and greatly
simplifies restore operations in the event of a server failure.