What are PST Files? Within Outlook, users are given the option to archive their emails. These emails are copied and converted into PST (Personal Storage Table) files which can be stored either locally or on an external drive.
What are the risks?
Additional business costs: Administrators might be faced with the task of discovering PST Files from within the organisation as well as recovering data from corrupt PST files. This time consuming process would not only increase the administrative burden, but it might also have costs associated with it as the organisation would have to deal with data loss as well as possible data exposure.
With a Cloud Email Archiving solution, individual employees can have access to their entire email history. The contents of their email messages are kept intact and unaltered within a secure environment where it can be quickly accessed at a later date via the search tool. This tool will help minimise the administrative burden as well as reducing the likelihood of sensitive data exposure. Prone to corruption: Due to original PST files having a 2GB size limit, they often became corrupt once they exceeded their size limit. Although less prone to corruption modern PST files are still problematic especially if they are stored in locations where they might be accessed by more than one user at the same time.
Email Archiving has unlimited Space to store all your emails. So unlike the PST files, your archived emails are not likely to exceed their size limit therefore eliminating the change of getting corrupt. Rarely Backed Up: Organisations might experience data loss due to their PST files not being backed up often. This is because; PST files typically reside on removable storage devices, which are unlikely to be backed up by the by most administrators.
Email Archiving is a fully managed solution, which means that archived files are regularly backed up by the solution provider. Not Secure: PST files make it very hard to keep sensitive data confidential. This is because these files are usually local to a device. Meaning that if that device is somehow compromised (hacked), then the PST files stored within it have no protection against being accessed.
Cloudsis Email Archiver is a cloud based solution where everything is centralised and protected. This protects organisations from having sensitive information being duplicated and stored in several machines where it will be vulnerable. Compliance Issues: With PST files; it is difficult to control the email retention periods, they are not easily searchable, and users can manipulate the data and delete important emails. This makes PST files dangerous as they do not comply with the upcoming GDPR regulations.
Email Archiving preserves and protects emails whilst ensuring that their contents can be retrieved unaltered in any way within a reasonable amount of time. Archiver can be set so that it automatically removes emails once their retention period required by GDPR, has passed.