The recently-released Osterman Research report,‘The Case for Third Party Archiving in Microsoft Exchange Environments’ shows that although recent versions of Exchange have basic archiving capabilities, companies that have advanced compliance, e-discovery or legal hold requirements will want to consider adding third-party archiving and compliance tools to meet regulatory or other corporate obligations.

Companies in the financial services, energy, healthcare and pharmaceutical industries are especially likely to require more sophisticated third-party archiving solutions, as are publicly-held corporations and others that must follow strict state and local government records retention mandates.

Completing the archiving solution

Even with the archiving capabilities built into Microsoft Exchange 2013, there are still a significant number of capabilities missing, which companies often require to meet compliance, e-discovery or legal obligations. These include the ability to:

• Perform indexing of a large number of file types
• Remain in full control of records retention management for IT purposes
• Perform e-discovery and compliance actions on non-Exchange content
• Support role-based search, tailored to specific groups or departments
• Automate supervision of email with saved searches
• Add comments, tags, or review workflow to search results
• Show ‘hit’ highlighting, where returned search results clearly highlight searched keywords or phrases

From an IT perspective—the archiving functions in Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 offer a number of useful features, but do not reduce the load on Exchange servers, because content is not moved to a separate archive system. So, companies need to evaluate the architecture of Exchange, with respect to per mailbox storage capacity and its impact on backup, recovery and total storage cost. Many will need third-party solutions to manage total storage capacity in Exchange.

If you’d like more information about the benefits of implementing a third-party solution with Exchange!