What is in your Sent Items today?
Purchase orders? Approvals? Supply agreements?
And your Inbox?
Invoices? Receipts? Customer complaints?
Do you and your staff rely on your email system for storage of documentation in the form of attachments? Most of us do without realizing it.
Data loss is a tragedy experienced by all businesses at some point. The lesson of thorough and automated backups has been learned by many a SMB but even those vigilant enough to have a system in place can overlook one giant gap.
Some types of data can be re-entered; some can be retrieved at a cost by the professionals. However, one of the most crippling risks businesses take is not adequately protecting email data.
Email communications in and out of a business are now widely accepted as binding. Not only your own messages but also those of your employees can be called upon as evidence in disputes and legal proceedings. Not having evidence of email ‘conversations’ and the commitments made in them can really have a terrible consequences. How can you prove your argument if you can’t produce the evidence?
A Queensland Real Estate business learned the hard way. ‘I had assumed that my property management staff dealt with email correspondence responsibly. It was only when we needed to produce email history of a tenant request that I was informed my staff deleted everything from their email as soon as each item was actioned. We had no documentation.’
In this case it wasn’t a malicious action, just inexperience. But it goes to show that policies such as email archiving are not the responsibility of individual staff. A business must be proactive and set the system in place to protect its interests.
In the case of the Real Estate business, they lost their case at the magistrate’s court and had to accept the cost to resolve the outstanding issue. A cost they would not have had if they had been able to produce the data.
Matters can be much more serious than this. Personnel issues including bullying and discrimination are generally initiated and enforced by email.
Leading online backup provider, Spheritec recognizes the need for long-term email storage and will now provide businesses with premium email archiving and the unique ability to instantly find and recover current, old and even deleted email.
As the only archiving solution of its type in Australia, MailRevive differs from competing products with its automated, live and offsite feature-set, suited for businesses with multiple staff and offices.
Spheritec Managing Director, David Glavonjic says, ‘The inability to produce thorough email communications relating to specific instances is unacceptable today and in the future. Records are compulsory for dispute resolution, both in-house and by the legal fraternity.’
Mr. Glavonjic continues, ‘MailRevive ensures email is automatically backed-up, secure and instantly recoverable, with the ability to search on sender, attachments, subject and content’.
One feature designed to particularly suit Australian SMB’s is the monthly or annual subscription structure. Besides a nominal ‘set up’ charge, there is no upfront investment to use the service.‘Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the future in technology delivery. Allowing for uncomplicated scalability or growth is essential when catering for SMB’s.’
This article was provided by Spheritec, to learn more or contact Spheritec click here