Should You Back Up Your Email?
Email is a big part of the data that a Central Florida business generates and receives every day, but it’s not always part of the company’s backup process.
Companies will often backup files and folders on hard drives and servers, but not specifically include emails from platforms like Microsoft 365, G Suite, or their own mail server.
Yet, email holds some of the most important data in a company, including vital customer communications. 81% of small and mid-sized businesses say email is their primary customer acquisition method and 80% say it’s vital for customer retention.
The loss of email that’s not backed up properly can lead to:
- Compliance problems with guidelines like HIPAA, GDPR, and others
- Legal issues due to loss of crucial communications
- Loss of business from lost customer messages
- Productivity losses from having to piece together data from lost messages
Here’s why it’s important to include business emails in your backup and recovery strategy.
Save Money on Additional Storage Charges
Once you hit a specific limit in some email platforms, you’re charged more per month to expand your space. You can avoid additional storage charges for email if you’re backing up your older email messages regularly.
You can simply ensure you retain an archive copy of older messages in a separate backup program and then delete older messages in your cloud platform to free up space and avoid paying for additional storage.
Outages Can Cause You to Lose Access to Emails
Cloud email platforms can and do have outages from time to time. Any serious outage could cause you to lose access to important emails for an unknown period of time.
Companies like Microsoft note in their service policies that you should be backing up all your data separately to avoid loss of access in case of an outage.
Microsoft states in its Service Agreement: “We recommend you regularly backup your Content and Data that you store on the Services…”
You Won’t Be Hampered by Data Retention Policies
Email data retention policies in cloud platforms can cause you to lose important email messages, and you may not even realize it.
Retention policies for emails can be complicated. For example, Microsoft’s default messaging records management (MRM) retention policies for Exchange Online and Exchange Server include 11 different tag considerations.
Message retention policies can differ according to:
- Draft messages
- Sent messages
- Junk folder
- Deleted items folder
When you back up all your email messages, you ensure that you won’t unknowingly lose data because a certain email has reached a retention policy limit and is purged from the system automatically.
You’ll Be Able to Restore Emails & Attachments
Often, in the case of a lost email, it’s the attachment that someone was really in need of keeping. They may have left it stored in their inbox but didn’t actually save the attachment separately on their device.
When you use a backup system that’s designed for email backup, in the event of a user’s computer crashing or any other data loss event, you’ll have the ability to easily restore all emails and any file attachments.
You Won’t Have to Worry About Compliance Issues
Compliance standards like HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, or other data protection rules often require having a clear continuity when it comes to electronic transactions, and emails are generally part of these.
If you’ve lost any of your email due to a natural disaster, server crash, user error, or other reason, you could end up with big problems when it comes to compliance.
Backing up your emails regularly, ensures that all your important messages are preserved and can be retrieved when needed.
Mitigates Downtime in the Event of a Disaster
There are any number of reasons that a user or a company can lose their emails, from a hurricane destroying an on-premises server that held mail to a malicious malware attack.
Downtime can cost a small business over $10,000 per hour, so every minute counts when it comes to getting your systems back up and running, including your business email.
When you’ve backed your emails properly in a separate backup and recovery system, you have the ability to easily restore all those messages to another device quickly, mitigating downtime.
You’re Protected from Malicious Destruction
Whether it’s due to malware or a disgruntled ex-employee, malicious file deletion can happen, and it can cause you to lose important emails that have been erased without your permission.
Having a separate backup copy of all your business emails protects you in the case of this type of malicious destruction.
Get a Reliable Email Backup Solution from C Solutions!
We can help your Central Florida business with solid and reliable solutions for backup of all your business email, whether it’s on-premises or stored in a cloud platform.
Schedule a free consultation today! Call 407-536-8381 or reach us online.