On a quest for cyber resilience, small and medium businesses (SMBs) usually understand the importance of security measures like installing a firewall, setting up multifactor authentication (MFA) or even establishing internet and social media policies. But, as they say, the devil is in the details, and one detail that might leave SMBs vulnerable to cyberattacks is a lack of proper email archiving and storage.

Formalizing email archiving policies and selecting an archiving solution often get pushed to the bottom of the IT manager’s to-do list, which presents an opportunity for your managed services business to offer a solution. With email archiving, you can help your SMB clients to:

1. Protect Data. Archiving emails and attachment with a secure cloud-based solution protects your clients’ businesses by limiting company and customer data accessible to bad actors—cybercrooks and malicious insiders—through endpoints like mobile phones and laptops or active mail servers.
2. Improve Email Security. Similarly, best-in-class email archiving solutions ensure that emails and attachments are moved off site, stored securely, are tamper-proof and protected by continuous data backup.
3. Prevent Data Loss. Storing email messages and their related files off-site via a reputable, secure solution, ensures they can be recovered if accidentally (and permanently deleted), a device is lost or stolen or if a network crash or attack like ransomware, holding data hostage.
4. Boost Employee Productivity. Email has become such a huge part of our daily workday that many of us block time on our calendars just to answer email. Over time, the onslaught of emails causes mailbox bloat that can make searching for emails super slow. Archiving can eliminate bloat and enable employees to find the record they’re search for quickly.
5. Increase Network Performance. Email bloat not only slows down employee productivity, but it also impedes network performance. Overflowing email can bring Outlook servers to a crawl or even a crash. Email archiving can help to keep this from happening.
6. Reduce Email Storage. The daily deluge of emails means that messages pile up fast. Not all of them can be deleted because we may need them “just in case” and some must be stored due to company data retention policies or regulations. Automatically, moving them to a cloud-based email archiving platform is a simple and secure solution. Plus, archiving may include advanced compression or deduplication functions that can reduce disk space.  
7. Ensure Regulatory Compliance. As noted, some industry regulations require businesses to retain messages and records for a certain period. Archiving ensures compliance by providing a secure place to store these files, and it makes them accessible in case they’re necessary for legal discovery. An email archiving system also may be set up so that compliance is handled automatically.