Whether your business is using G-Suite, Office 365 or another email server, the fine-print agreements release those providers from liability for anything happening to your email data. The reality is Microsoft, Google, etc. are liable for the infrastructure on which your data resides (i.e. if their data center goes down, they’re going to do what they can to get it back and running). They are not answerable for your data, including emails.
In January Bryley featured an interview with back-up expert Alex Courson about the need to treat these cloud servers same as you would if the servers were in your building. 1 “So this means [you follow] the 3-2-1 policy, where you have three copies at two locations and one off-site. If you have [all copies of your data] at the same cloud site and Google crashes, you still can’t get anything back,” Alex said.
Though Alex was speaking about backing-up, archiving also needs a strategy that doesn’t rely on the same server that’s hosting your email, because nearly eighty percent of organizations that have data in the cloud lose data every twelve months. 2
Backing-Up and Archiving
Backing-up is the regular copying of your active data — the data is continually evaluated for changes and updated. The purpose of the back-ups is that should disaster strike, a duplicate of your current state has your operation running again quickly.
In contrast, archiving ensures that your business’s records remain secure and retrievable in their preserved, original state for whatever period of time you determine. There is no overwriting of previously saved data. An archive is easy to understand if you think of regulatory requirements. For example a bank needs to retain its transaction records for so many years. But even if your business is not subject to data retention regulations, an employee still may need to locate a PDF attachment from 2017.
Email Continuity in Spite of Mail Server Failures
Bryley recommends Sophos Reflexion’s email archiving system RADAR 3. RADAR makes all your messages — including new messages — available through its web interface. Once your mail server is back online, Reflexion re-syncs all your messages with your normal mail client so there are no gaps in service. RADAR gives you a complete, searchable email archive, including retrieval of emails that have been deleted on your mail server.
Be Confident Mail is Safe, Too
Reflexion’s RADAR creates an encrypted archive (in a Class-A datacenter with a secure and redundant infrastructure) of every message you send and receive. But Reflexion first gives you a series of selectable email security filters. This award-winning filter array includes AI Deep Learning so it adapts as spam changes, Bayesian/word statistics, To, Subject and Header field analyses, word pattern analysis, similar vocabulary analysis, SMTP analysis, hyperlink analysis and comparison, contact verification and email format analysis.
Similarly, when sending emails Reflexion is designed to give you confidence in what’s being sent by employees — by filtering and encrypting sensitive company and personal data. 4
Quick Searches of Your Business’s Emails
Reflexion makes sure your electronic communications are automatically preserved apart from your mail server, for intelligent discovery, rapid recovery, and continuous access. And there’s no new hardware or software to be installed, all your mail is available from any device with an internet connection. Bryley Systems uses and partners with Sophos Reflexion. If you would like to discuss archiving your business’s emailed data, give Bryley a call at 978.562.6077 option 2 or email ITExperts@Bryley.com.
1 https://www.Bryley.com/2020/01/21/talking-with-office-365-and-g-suite-back-up-expert-alex-courson/
2 https://spanning.com/resources/whitepapers/global-data-protection-survey-report-2016/
3 RADAR is an acronym for Reflexion Archiving Discovery and Recovery
4 See last month’s https://www.Bryley.com/2020/07/17/email-encryption-that-works/ for a look at Reflexion’s robust encryption approach
