E-mail archiving still uncommon in corporate world

E-mail archiving is still in its infancy, according to a survey commissioned by enterprise e-mail archiving supplier C2C.

Despite regulatory requirements and IDC forecasts that e-mail archiving applications will see an annual growth rate of 23% in the next five years, only 24% of those polled were using e-mail archiving.

Hundreds of network administrators, system managers and other IT personnel were questioned about their company's e-mail infrastructure and long-term retention methods.

The survey report found 37% of respondents believed storing e-mail in personal folders was the same as archiving and 51% of system administrators do not consider relying on personal folders for long-term storage to be a problem.

Although hacking and abuse of e-mail systems continues to be a problem, 47% of those surveyed said they never checked the integrity of access to mailboxes for any level of employee.

"I am surprised by the casual attitude taken with e-mail system security and the retaining of important data in PSTs [personal folders]," said Dave Hunt, chief executive at C2C.

E-mail archiving software is designed to reduce risk, optimise performance and minimise compliance issues by satisfying regulatory requirements for e-mail retention.

Archiving software typically includes analytical search capability and policy enforcement to centralise, automate and accelerate tasks that reduce risk associated with e-mail and improve system usage.