Email Archiving in Exchange 2010: Will You Still Need Third-party Email Archiving Solutions?

We're seeing a lot of questions from organizations that are considering deploying an email archiving solution (such as Proofpoint ARCHIVE) about what impact, if any, Microsoft Exchange 2010 will have on their email archiving plans.

Among the many enhancements in Exchange 2010 are basic email retention features, basic eDiscovery features and a variety of storage management improvements. The question is, will these improvements eliminate the need for third-party archiving solutions?

Proofpoint email archiving expert Rick Dales wrote up a great summary of the new archiving-related features in Exchange 2010 and how well they address the true email archiving and eDiscovery needs that we see in enterprises today.

His comments are summarized in a new Proofpoint TechBrief which you can download by clicking the image in this post, or the link below (this document does not require registration to download):

Proofpoint TechBrief: Email Archiving and Exchange 2010 (PDF document)

This document does a great job of explaining these enhancements in the latest version of Exchange and how, for many enterprises, they won't replace the need for more robust third-party email archiving solutions. There's a lot of great detail in this document, but in short, we feel that:

"Organizations deploy archiving solutions to address three main business problems: Storage management, legal discovery and compliance. For some organizations, Microsoft’s solution may help address some storage management challenges. However, legal discovery seems to be the most pressing driver for recent archiving deployments—and Exchange 2010 only addresses the most basic of legal discovery scenarios. Finally, Exchange 2010 does not address the compliance concerns, particularly for SEC regulated firms, so these organizations clearly need a third-party archive."

Whichever side of this debate you take, I think you'll find this new TechBrief an interesting read! This topic will be the subject of an upcoming live Proofpoint web seminar in the new year. Watch the blog for details.