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Four bad archiving habits to break

You are an archivist. In fact, everyone throughout your organization is, from IT peers to knowledge workers to the C-suite. Hopefully, your archive isn't an old, on-premises storage box. In today's information-driven business world, it needs to be more than that. It needs to be a digital repository with multiple dimensions: It needs to safeguard corporate data; empower employees to access email when they want to and from anywhere; boost productivity and efficiency; and ensure legal, regulatory and compliance obligation are fulfilled – fast. Archiving can be a powerful tool with many capabilities. If you're still thinking about your archive in the traditional sense (that dusty on-prem catch-all), or if you're not thinking about your archive, you're likely making these costly, complicated – and completely avoidable – mistakes.*                                                                                                                                                     1.  Settling for “good enough” search When you perform a search, you expect fast results – and you probably expect to find what you're looking for in one attempt. Unfortunately, the magic number when it comes to archive search is “five”: on average, users have to run five searches per query, and only five percent actually find what they need. It gets worse. Fifty percent say these search queries take longer than five minutes each, with 20 percent reporting search completion times up to 10 minutes. 2.  Underestimating the importance of e-discovery Inefficient search is more than just frustrating. It can impact your ability to quickly respond to legal inquiries, and prevent you from meeting regulatory compliance obligations and external requests, like Subject Access Requests (SARs) and Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) requests under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – which is a concern for 84 percent of organizations. Perhaps because of the legal, regulatory and financial consequences, 44 percent of organizations are not totally confident in their current e-discovery capabilities. 3.  Not planning for downtime Uninterrupted access to email and archives during server downtime is a win-win for everyone: lines of communication stay open, productivity remains high, and disruption after a cyberattack remains low. That's why 91 percent of organizations say that in the event of system downtime or failure, they would want uninterrupted access to their email. Unfortunately, one-third say this isn't currently possible. 4.  Storing your data in one place Incidents like technical failure, human error and cyberattacks happen – and without sufficient backup and recovery in place, they can destroy your data. One corrupt email, one mistaken “delete,” or one phishing attack is all it takes to wipe out your entire corporate memory. Yet only 50 percent of organizations can recover all their data after one of these incidents occur, and a further 47 percent say they can recover only some of their data. Even though 99 percent of organizations think it's important to back up and recover archived email data, complete data recovery remains a pipe dream for most. Once you open your mind to new possibilities, you'll come to realize the true power of archiving and the business advantages it delivers.
Matthew Gardiner,
Senior Product Marketing Manager
*2017 Vanson Bourne global survey, commissioned by Mimecast

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