Email archiving in Cloud

Our Email Archival Solution
CSS Corp Labs provides an affordable, reliable and secured Email Archiving solution which help clients to meet their compliance, storage management and best practice requirements. CSS Corp leverages AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud computing and storage infrastructure to provide clients with scalable solutions that also enable email archives’ smooth transition into a cloud environment. The web interface of solution helps users to view their emails with an extensive search mechanism.

In today's business scenario, the email is a prominent mode of effective communication for organizations to execute their day-to-day business activities, which results in augmentation of their email infrastructure, its resources and staff.

Current archiving mechanism

Desktop email archiving system
A desktop email archiving system enables the user to archive emails in their own desktop, which will be easily accessible via an email client. However, users will not be enabled to access the archived emails in desktop from any other remote environments.

Server email archiving system
A server email archiving system enables the user to archive emails in a server dedicated for archival. The emails archived in the server will be accessible by the user from any remote environments using an email client.

Challenges
 The various challenges facing the organizations utilizing the email archival services are:

Availability

The users utilizing current email archival system will not be able to access archived mails if the desktop or the archival server is down. Hence users will resort to using personal email accounts to continue business transactions which are independent of their corporate email system. This will result in a loss of intellectual property that will be expensive and extremely difficult to recover.

Expenses

The growth in email data eventually motivates the organization to augment its IT infrastructure, which will result in increase of capital expenditure incurred in the form of hardware and software. With communications using email applications growing exponentially day-by-day, the organization will not be able to budget keeping future trends in mind. Increasing IT infrastructure will result in augmenting resources managing the same; this new investment in IT infrastructure also leads to training for the existing resources, which in turn, leads to causing burden on both physical resources and the IT staff. Also, focus of IT will be shifted from the business needs of organization to unproductive management of IT resources.

Search
With contents archived in various locations (desktops, mail servers, etc), the current email archival system will not facilitate a rapid and efficient search of archived email contents, thereby reducing the reliability of the existing archival system. If the emails are provided with attachments, the complexities will worsen. While the mailing system can help searching for header and mail body text, it fails in scanning the attached content/file. Also, searching for an email within a period of time will cause users to end up searching multiple databases.

Flexibility
The current rigid email archiving system does not have the flexibility to adapt to complex enterprise models and workflows associated with it.

Security
The Desktop Archival mechanism is not a secured mechanism since it fails to identify trusted members of the emailing system, thus overriding corporate mail security policies. The loss of sensitive data in archived emails will have a huge impact on corporate credibility.

CSS Corp Solution
Our solution ensures smooth transition of email archival into a cloud environment. It offers indexing, search and retrieval solutions available as a service focused on end users.

Architecture

• Archived E-mail contents will be extracted from SMTP server
• E-Mail contents will be stored in centralized cloud storage with time stamp
• Data extracted will be encrypted compressed and indexed
• Index information will be spread across multiple index files
• Users will be able to access the archived contents using a Web client Application
• Load Balancer will be in place to balance the user load and direct the user to an appropriate server for accessing the data

Features:

• Centralized email archival tool
• Role-based access privileges
• Schedule archival to the Cloud Storage
• Indexes all attachments
• Uses Blowfish encryption
• Simple and advanced search
• Request for search with approval workflow
• Single Sign-On Integration
• Search Option for attachment contents
• Attachments as links for download

Benefits:

• Costs shifting from capital expenditure to operational expenditure
• Provides clarity in budgeting for IT infrastructure
• Facilitates to shed burden on internal IT staff and physical resources
• Efficient and quick inbuilt search capability
• Leverage expertise of other services offered in cloud
• Helps organization to focus on their core competency