It goes without saying that back-up of email isn't true archiving. Archiving products use flexible rules-based systems to locate information by message criteria within the Exchange store. If you're using Outlook without Exchange, archiving means making sure you've got good backups of your PST files and know how to find information in them.

These indexing, searching, and retrieving features are key when an organization has to quickly meet email compliance regulations such as SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), NASD (National Association of Securities Dealers), NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), ISO (International Standards Organisation), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), BSI (British Standards Institute), DOD (Department of Defense) and others. Messages, archived to another Exchange server in a secure public folder need to be easily accessed by both administrators and users.

Maintaining message integrity is essential to the user for legal proof or otherwise. Osterman Research estimates that the average age of a retrievable email is 10 months, whereas regulations can demand records of three to six years, or even lifetime retention. An archiving solution will ensure that data is accessible years from now. The messages aren't overwritten after a certain period of time -- which is what is frequently done when companies reuse back-up tapes. There's a complete record available at all times.

If your company is not archiving email, it might be time to evaluate your storage strategy.

Dave Hunt is the CEO at C2C Systems Inc., a leading provider of email lifecycle management solutions for Exchange. He can be reached at dave.hunt@c2c.com.