cloudHQ is proud to announce support for Office 365 Mail.
Adding Microsoft Office 365 Mail to our list of supported applications means that you’ll now be able to share, replicate, and backup emails directly through cloudHQ.
The Golden Rules for Archive Storage:
- Archive storage should be under your control.
- You should have direct access to your archive which is independent of the service that is archiving your data.
- Archive should be stored in standard format which is not proprietary. In other words, your archive must not be in some proprietary format defined company that is doing your archive. For example, archives created by some other backup services are in proprietary format which can be read only thru that backup service. That is bad since that backup service might not be around when you need to access your archive.
- Archive your files using a large cloud storage company, such as Amazon.
For companies who are not in the finance or banking industry, you could also consider cloud storage options to include Dropbox or Google Drive; especially if your company is already set up on one of those services. Check with your legal team about regulations for companies in your industry.
2 Major Benefits:
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Archive your company’s Microsoft Office 365 Mail to your backup storage location in a way that’s compliant with SEC 17 a-f(4) and with CFTC 1.31(b)-(c) regulations.
- The benefit of doing this is to ensure that e-discovery is accessible and that no emails will ever get lost.
- Save all your company’s Email attachments to a dedicated folder in your backup file system like MS Sharepoint or Dropbox, instead of having them disorganized and located throughout your employees’ inboxes.
These features are configurable for everyone in your organization with just a few clicks. We’ll take a closer look at why you should archive all your emails and separate your email attachments.
Scenario 1:
Staying Compliant with SEC 17 a-f(4) and CFTC 1.31(b)-(c) Regulations
If you work in the finance industry, your company is probably required by law to keep your electronic files “preserved exclusively in a non-rewritable and non-erasable format.” That includes your email.
If your company uses Microsoft Office 365 Mail, you can now use cloudHQ to automatically archive all your emails in a way that’s compliant with these regulations.
To stay compliant, we recommend Amazon’s S3 service in combination with Amazon Glacier to host your email archive. Together, S3 and Glacier provide a cloud storage solution that’s reliable and accessible.
You could also use cloud storage provided by small backup companies such as Backupify. However, we caution against storing your long-retention archives that is provided by a smaller company instead of one that is more secure like Amazon.
Smaller companies might go out of business. It’s the truth. Startups often get acquired, leaving customers unsure of what the future will hold regarding a small company’s service, and your data storage it claims to safeguard.
It’s important that storage for your long-retention archive be under your direct control, not owned or managed by the same company which is actually performing your backup. And, most importantly, your long-retention archive should be managed by an established cloud storage company, such as Amazon. Amazon cloud storage will be available for years to come; and additionally, you know the they are passed the risk of being acquired.
Scenario 2: Saving Your Email Attachments
How many hours have you spent digging through old emails trying to find attachments?
Instead of trying to remember who sent the email or what the subject line of the email was, cloudHQ lets you create a filesystem folder to automatically collect any attachment you receive in your Office 365 Mail.
This way, all your attachments will easily be available in one easy-to-find folder inside your OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or SharePoint account.
This can be set up individually, or your system administrator can set up a folder for each user in your company with just a few clicks.
New Office 365 Features Coming Soon
We have dazzling new features coming out for Office 365 Mail users! Stay tuned to be able to:
- Automatically sync an Office 365 Mail folder with a folder in any cloud storage (OneDrive, Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox, Egnyte, etc.).
- Share an Office 365 Mail folder with anyone in the world (not just inside your company).
Whether you need to stay compliant with government regulations, or you just want to find email attachments when you need them, our new Office 365 Mail sync service is the perfect solution.
Photo used under Creative Commons from GotCredit