Email continues to play a vital role in the modern business, with employees using it for engaging with others – whether internally with colleagues or externally with customers, suppliers, sales partners and others.

Integrated ICT and infrastructure provider Vox has launched a cloud-based email archiving service, which is aimed at providing small and medium-sized South African businesses with peace of mind that their email environment is protected in case of a cyber attack, equipment failure, or even accidental deletion.

“For smaller organisations, it is likely that their email inbox acts as a repository for critical business documents such as quotes, invoices and email-based agreements, while their email contacts list serves as the backbone of the company’s customer relationship management efforts,” says Mayleen Bywater, Senior Product Manager for Email at Vox.

The risk for business, however, is that email is increasingly the target of cyberattacks, with methods such as malware, ransomware or spyware attachments, being used to cripple business and hold their data hostage unless payment is made to the hackers. Even beyond having to deal with criminal elements, disaster could strike simply through equipment failure or data corruption.

“Vox Archiving provides local SMEs – ideally with between one and fifty users – with a cost-effective method of storing their email data, and complements their existing archiving and storage, by acting as an alternative repository so that emails can be restored even if they were accidentally deleted. Companies can even share their emails with legal entities should they be required to do so,” adds Bywater.

Vox Archiving comes with unlimited storage, so users do not have to worry about how much space their email inboxes take up, and stores users’ data for up to ten years – longer than most business regulations that require businesses to retain documentation for between five and seven years. This means that while it is primarily aimed at smaller businesses, it can work just as well for larger enterprises.

According to Bywater, all email data will be stored in local data centres – ensuring that customers making use of the service remain compliant with data residency or sovereignty regulation – with built-in redundancy to ensure that information is protected and available when needed.

In addition, Vox can cater for customers who have existing email archives and want to consolidate all their information into a single location, with the service being carried out at a minimal per gigabyte cost.

“Vox Archiving is billed per user, per month, at the maximum number of ‘live’ users over the period, meaning they do not pay for the archival of email inboxes of employees who have since left the organisation. This means that customers can scale up and down the number of users as and when needed,” says Bywater.

Vox Archiving is available to business customers at the cost of R32 per month per active email inbox user with a minimum of 5 users per client and subject to the signing of a 12-month contract. The service complements any email platform; as long as a journal link can be created to connect the inbox and the archive. Visit the Vox website for more information.