Uniqcli

Cybersecurity

Email Archiving & Retention

Records obligations outlive mailboxes, and outlive staff. We quote the archiving license and the storage tier it writes to — and custody of the archive stays with the agency that owns the records.

Category
Long-horizon mail retention, search and legal-hold capability
What we quote
Archive subscriptions and the on-premises capacity behind them
Boundary
Custody of the archive and the retention schedule remain the agency's
Overview

A mailbox is not a record system, and deletion is not a retention policy

Public-sector records obligations run in decades; mailbox quotas run in gigabytes, and staff turnover runs faster than either. An archive exists to break that dependency — mail is captured on the way through, indexed, held for the schedule the records officer set, and produced on demand without depending on whether the original account still exists. The buying decision has two halves that are usually quoted by two different people: the archive subscription, priced per mailbox or per volume, and the storage it lands on, which is a capacity and durability decision with a very different cost curve. We quote both together, and we are explicit that custody of the resulting archive belongs to the agency, not to us and not to a supplier who might be replaced at the next recompete.

Limits

What stays yours to decide

The retention schedule is a records-management determination made by your agency under its own authority — how long each category is held, what triggers disposition, and what a legal hold suspends. No supplier can make that call, and a product that ships with a default schedule has made an assumption, not a decision.

Operating the archive is likewise yours: running searches, responding to discovery, certifying productions. What we supply is the license, the capacity it writes to and the integration work to get capture running. We do not operate the platform after handover. The console, the policy, the tuning and the response process stay with your team or the MSP you have chosen; what we supply is the license, the hardware it runs on and the integration work that puts both into service.

Questions

Archiving questions

Is a backup the same as an archive?

No, and treating one as the other is a common and expensive mistake. A backup exists to restore a system to a recent point; an archive exists to produce a specific record years later, indexed and searchable, with its retention state intact. They have different cost curves, different retention windows and different failure modes — most programs end up buying both.

How is email archiving priced?

Usually per mailbox per year, sometimes with a storage component or a volume band above an included allowance. On-premises designs shift more of the cost into capacity, which is why we quote the storage tier alongside the license rather than leaving it to be discovered in year two.

Can the archive stay inside our boundary?

Yes, where the product supports an on-premises or appliance deployment. That choice moves the storage sizing onto your side of the quote and makes capacity planning part of the buy — which is why the arrays and platforms above are quoted with it.

Ask AI about Uniqcli

Email Archiving & Retention

Quote an archive against your retention schedule

Send the mailbox count, the retention window your records officer works to and whether the archive has to stay inside your boundary. We return one quote covering the license and the capacity it writes to.