Email Challenges

Nearly every IT department is struggling with the issue of storage management because of growing email volumes. The pressure to increase storage limits continues to grow as the amount of email sent each day, as well as the size of messages and attachments, increases. And the growth is not expected to slow down anytime soon. In fact, Radicati Research estimates that corporate email traffic will almost double between 2005 and 2009.

The great expense is not so much buying it, since relatively cheap storage brings in the initial purchase price at just 20% of storage-related expenditures. But managing it is another story: Email administration tasks, like backups and restores, gobbles up 43% of IT support costs. Companies are adopting and growing their storage area networks to manage their email glut as much as their critical database storage.

By automatically offloading data into an archive, an email archiving system can dramatically help improve the efficiency of messaging servers, their reliability and the speed with which they deliver messages.

One of the most important considerations for businesses, regardless of size or industry, is the issue of electronic search and discovery. Electronic discovery (or "e-discovery") refers to the retrieval of data from a computer to meet a legal request. But, it can also refer to non-legal requests for regulatory compliance, HR concerns, and critical customer communications for company needs.

Recently, the electronic discovery burden on IT organizations has increased in both frequency and demand. According to Osterman Research:

	Two-thirds (66%) of IT organizations have referred to email or IM archives or backup tapes to support their organization's innocence in a legal case.
	Nearly two-thirds (63%) of organizations have been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee emails or instant messages.

This is not surprising when you consider that email is just as admissible in court as paper-based documents, and can be requested for legal discovery at any time. In fact, email evidence has been the smoking gun in numerous cases of illegal corporate activity. According to the American Management Association, 27% of Fortune 500 companies have defended themselves against claims of sexual harassment stemming from inappropriate emails and/or Internet use.

Without effective email archiving in place it is time-consuming and expensive to search and restore email databases from backup media. Lacking email management tools makes email applications such as Exchange especially challenging. If the IT administrator is forced to search archived databases they are forced to dedicate a separate server to the task, and individually search and restore each separate backup tape that might hold a relevant message.

But, time is of the essence when retrieving data for a discovery request. In most cases, a strict time limit is placed on when data must be produced. For example, the SEC generally requires that requested email be produced within 48 hours of the request. Failure to produce requested email in a reasonable timeframe can result in significant fines.

Without an email archiving solution, that can quickly search across users and data ranges, it is also difficult to limit searches for appropriate data before presentation to litigators, creating opportunities for unnecessary data to be exposed. Ultimately, the cost of innocence can be extremely high for organizations that do not proactively manage email usage and archiving.

In recent years, the archiving of email messages has become a business requirement driven by numerous federal and state regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC 17a 3-4, HIPAA , and NASD rules. With more than 10,000 regulations on data and record retention currently in force, very few business are exempt from some sort of regulatory scrutiny.

These regulations are forcing businesses to retain email just as they must retain other formal corporate records -- or face penalties that can include significant fines or even criminal charges. With a policy-driven archiving system in place, email can be checked for compliance with regulations, and then retained for the appropriate amount of time. These solutions can also reduce the risk of inappropriate content being exchanged, as employees can be alerted when an email doesn't comply with company policy.

Beyond the capacity issues associated with storage management, email has also become the de facto filing system for many organizations. Everything from sales proposals and marketing plans to competitor profiles, contracts, and personnel files can exist—sometimes exclusively—in an employees' inbox.

Maintaining an archive that allows end-users to easily access and search all previous email can greatly improve productivity. In addition, vital content cannot be deleted by a disgruntled employee (in the event of an employee leaving the company), the trail of information managed by that staff member can be accessed at any time in the future.