Archiving and storing e-mails uses up valuable resources, and with
e-mail use set to spiral businesses need to plan and implement an
e-mail strategy now or pay the penalty
Just as storage area networks were the vital storage issue in 2000,
and virtualisation drove the storage debate in 2001, the hottest
topic today is the management of e-mail - or the lack of it. This
has been fuelled by recent news reports that it could be a target
for future European legislation.
There are some alarming statistics regarding e-mail storage that IT
managers may do well to consider.
It is a fact that 60% of a company's business-critical information
is stored in the corporate messaging system, so protection of this
data should be the main priority. Even in those companies where the
data is protected, more than 80% of users cannot retrieve their
archived messages without the help of the IT department - and this
represents a drain on human resources.
Already overstretched IT departments are now having to spend an
extra five to six hours a week recovering archive messages in
addition to the average eight hours that is spent each week backing
up the e-mail system.
Worse still, messages that are more than a year old can take up to
a working day to recover, which is obviously not acceptable for
business-critical information.
When was the last time you sorted your e-mails and discarded
unwanted items? Think of all those e-mails with attachments of
multiple-megabytes presentations, then multiply your e-mail
database by all the people in your organisation. Staggering, isn't
it?
With more than 90% of UK businesses using e-mail, it is estimated
that more than 9.7 billion e-mails are sent daily and this is
figure is forecast to rise to 35 billion e-mails a day in 2005.
Incredibly, of this number only 17% are efficiently managed in a
way to speed up rapid recall.
As the quantity of e-mails increases, it is clear that the cost of
managing this data is going to accelerate and become a major issue
for all businesses.
It is my opinion that in order to cope with the vast proliferation
of e-mail, companies need to be prepared to look at cost,
management and staff resource issues. I believe that we need to be
realistic about the true cost of managing the vast amounts of
storage dedicated to e-mail.
Initial outlay in terms of storage solutions is only a small
fraction of the cost of actually managing this data. For example,
the total cost of ownership in a Windows-type environment can grow
to up to 40 times the purchase cost, once utilisation and
management costs are taken into account. It only takes a moment to
think about this, either start planning an e-mail strategy around
automating the management and archiving activities or be prepared
to take on up to 60% more staff.
So the time is now - not next week or the week after - to plan and
implement an e-mail management strategy, and so prevent costly
staff and resource wastage.
If we recognise that e-mail use will burgeon along with the
importance of the data contained within, there should be no reason
why this cannot be managed in a
cost- effective manner.
Derek Warry is strategic business manager at
InTechnology