6 Top Features for Your Business Archiving Software

Adopting digital archiving solutions has become the norm for retaining business files efficiently and securely.

But with so many solutions on the market, choosing the one that perfectly matches your business needs takes time and effort.This article will discuss the crucial features to look for in archiving software and how they can be helpful for your business.

 1. Access Controls

One of the most critical features of your company’s potential archiving solution must be the ability to control who has permission to access – read, write, or delete the stored data.

To clarify, this feature has nothing to do with the company’s level of trust in employees. But, the more people can access the files, make changes or delete them, the higher the chances for mistakes. An employee can unintentionally or unknowingly accidentally delete or change data, with effects sometimes hot being reversible.

You must be able to control your employees’ access regarding their position and role. For example, if an employee needs access to read data, you should be able to assign such permission only. This way, you will minimize the odds of unintentional human errors.

Such a feature will also keep those with malicious intentions at bay, so you will reduce the risk of sabotage and data leaks by controlling data access.

2. Searchability

Electronic archives don’t just store information – they also organize and index it. The best digital archiving software gathers and stores metadata, making it easier to find the information you’re looking for quickly and efficiently when you need it.

The capability to search through archived data is at the core of any archiving software. Your software needs an advanced search feature to find the information quickly. It means it must let you make queries using keywords, file name, type, size, author, source, and many other meta-data.

An example of an advanced search feature is eDiscovery. eDiscovery searches for relevant evidence in email, instant messages, social profiles, digital images, website content, etc. The feature is most commonly used in civil and criminal litigations, where both parties must disclose all data and files pertinent to the case.

3. Email Archiving

Whether you use internal or external mail in your company, you want a solid archive of your business-related correspondence. You should always separate such an archive from the SMTP/POP3 server. If an owner deletes emails or even their account haphazardly, you can always bring them back in no time.

Email archiving works directly with eDiscovery. Archiving software with such a feature will provide you with all data you need in a form that fits even the court’s requirements. So, in the case of any claims or court litigation involving your business, you can quickly investigate the matter and find all the relevant data you need.

4. Social Media Archiving

Social media has become the crucial channel businesses use to interact with their clients and keep them engaged with the brand.

However, although we can hardly deny social media’s benefits, some serious risks are associated with its use.

For example, social media defamation, most often in the form of libel, coming from an individual or an organized group can have severe consequences for your business reputation.

Moreover, with social media being a regular part of your employees’ correspondence, the odds of data leaks or online harassment have increased.

To stay on top of these and many other possible risks related to social media, opt for a solution with social media archiving feature.

5. Deduplication

Your employees can often duplicate data and files, leading to version clashes and duplicate entries. This may put you in the position of comparing all these versions to decide on the original. Furthermore, duplicate data can take up a lot of space if not removed and incur extra costs to your company for additional storage.

That’s why deduplication is one of the crucial features to look for in an archiving solution.

Deduplication prevents and eliminates duplicates or copies of the same data in the archive and optimizes your storage space.

Digital archiving solutions can save time, storage space, and frustration by automating this process using deduplication. They use algorithms to compare entries, determine which files are instances of the same thing, and then merge the changes. At the same time, they keep logs of these changes, merges, and eliminations.

6. Retention Control

The last but equally important is the retention management feature—only some of the data you store needs to be kept forever. If you store unnecessary files past their relevance, your archives will bloat, become slower to search, and more expensive to maintain.

You need a straightforward and intuitive retention feature that gives complete, transparent control over the criteria for keeping/deleting things while letting you stay compliant with the relevant legislation.

In Conclusion

Data archiving software will provide a robust and easy way to store your data for long-term retention and retrieval. In addition, by delivering your business advanced search capabilities, and the ability to archive a wide variety of media, including email and social media, your archiving software can significantly improve your business efficiency and regulatory compliance.