Solution Spotlight Email Backups

How Secure is your Organization’s Email Data?

Like most companies, the amount of email you’ve sent and received over the past decade has been increasing exponentially.  Email is convenient, flexible, and can be used to keep extensive records of everything we do in the workplace.  Has your boss ever asked you to dig out an email about a previous project?  Do you feel confident that you could easily retrieve an email from a year ago?  How about two?  How about five?

What would happen if you couldn’t find that email from 5 years ago?

Maybe you didn’t think you’d ever need it – your mailbox was filling up and you needed to clear out space.  You were absentmindedly checking work emails on a weekend and accidentally deleted it because smartphone screens are small and you have normal adult-sized hands.  Is your boss going to be sympathetic? Likely not. 

How do you prepare for such a scenario?

If you’ve migrated to a cloud email provider, like Microsoft’s Office 365 or Google’s GSuite, you’ve already taken a great step forward to secure your data.  These platforms have clusters located across the world to provide a resilient infrastructure – if a hurricane destroys a data center in Georgia, you’ll still be able to access all of your emails because your emails already replicated to their data center in California.

“I’ve got office 365, No need to worry.”

You may be surprised, though, to learn that the average Office 365 plan does not include email backup.  If you deleted an email from your inbox and then deleted it from your trash (which generally is purged by itself on a rolling basis), you’re not going to be able to recover that email if you need it down the line.

If you’ve ever let an employee go, you might’ve found out the hard way that things can get messy.  I’ve seen everything from the deletion of a few incriminating emails to a full-scale mass deletion of every single item in their mail account.  Better hope someone else was CC’d on all of those emails!

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Probably the biggest email scam these days is ‘phishing’, where spammers try to gain access to your account by ‘sharing’ a file with you on a bogus website, which prompts for your email password.  If you type it in, they’ve just harvested your password and will be moving in to mess with your account – grabbing all of your contacts, sending spam emails, etc.  I saw a user lose their entire inbox when a phisher maliciously deleted every single email they had, to cover their tracks.

Luckily there is a solution!

What if I told you that you could have every single email ever sent and received securely backed up? This way, no matter who tries to delete those emails, they’d be safe.  It wouldn’t impact your workflow in any way – you would still be able to delete an email from your inbox, but when doing so, instead of throwing it into the ether, it would simply be moved to a lockbox, out of sight and out of mind, that only your admin has the keys to.

The truth is, email subscriptions are already costly. On top of that, increasing your monthly bill for IT services is probably very low on your to-do list. I get it.  Besides ironclad email security, jumping from an entry-level subscription to an enterprise subscription will bring along a host of other perks, like getting the latest and greatest Microsoft Office desktop programs on your computers and mobile devices, email encryption capabilities, larger mailbox size quotas, online archiving (which will improve your outlook performance- more to come on that in future blogs), and more. For more information on securing your company’s email data, contact the TNS Group.

Categories: Managed Service Provider, MSP Blogs