For businesses around the world, email has become the primary means of communication with people inside and outside of the organization. Business transactions kick off in the form of an email, most customers use e-mail to negotiate contracts and agreements and exchange invoices and payment information. Email is also heavily used by marketing departments to issue mailshots to customers announcing new offers and special deals and so on.
The business case for email archiving For businesses around the world, email has become the primary means of communication with people inside and outside of the organization. Business transactions kick off in the form of an email, most customers use e-mail to negotiate contracts and agreements and exchange invoices and payment information. Email is also heavily used by marketing departments to issue mailshots to customers announcing new offers and special deals and so on. Yet businesses fail to realize that each email communication sent or received is probably the only record they have of important transactions with a customer or between members of staff. Many organizations underestimate the value of knowledge that is stored in corporate email. According to Osterman research, email contains nearly 75% of the information that individuals use on a daily basis, therefore, the amount of corporate knowledge stored in email is enough to justify its safekeeping over long periods of time. Businesses, however, are still finding it hard to accept that they need an email archiving solution. Many simply rely on traditional backups to solve the problem - a strategy that only provides a temporary solution. Research carried out by GFI Software in the UK and US found that 51% and 53% respectively do not use an email archiving solution. Awareness on the importance of email archiving is also somewhat lacking. GFI's research found that in the UK, 30% of SMBs do not feel they are sufficiently informed about email archiving while 36% of SMBs in the US feel they do not know enough on the subject. Why should a business archive email? Within a single organization, perspectives on email archiving and email management can vary widely. The legal department, for example, sees email as an essential factor in its discovery responses strategy. Storage, backups, problematic and corrupt PST files, overloaded email servers and performance are the IT department's major concerns. The compliance team is concerned about preservation and control issues while employees want to access to all their email from anywhere in the world to improve productivity. Whichever way you look at the issue, a company can ill-afford not to archive email because it never knows when and which email it will need at a future date. That email may be a 'to-do' list compiled by sales but it may also be an email that could save a company thousands of dollars in legal fees and fines.
The following are the main reasons why a business needs to archive its email: Access to old / deleted emails Traditional backup solutions that restore systems if a business suffers an outage, such as a disk system failure, are no longer sufficient. These backup products do not allow the administrator or employees to easily search through thousands of e-mails to find, for example, the messages outlining the payment information that another company had agreed to. With an email archiving solution management and employees can search for, and retrieve old or deleted emails in minutes. A perfect example is Quantum Marine Engineering. Their investment in an archiving solution paid off in the eyes of management when a customer had asked in an email to them about the suitability of a component they were using to hook up a piece of our equipment. Quantum's sales force and technicians both were adamant about having replied, saying that what they were proposing wasn't suitable; but no one could come up with the email. Within five minutes, Quantum's administrator found the email using a keyword search as well as the whole string and conversation. He also discovered the reason why no one could find it in their Exchange mailboxes: The email with the key to the puzzle had been sent through a couple of techs and finally through a department head who no one had included in the original list of possible responders. Storage problems The volume of email that is being generated on a daily basis is becoming a problem for IT administrators. As employees send and receive more emails with larger attachments, storage space on the server starts running out. If server quotas cannot be increased, then emails must be stored in PST files on workstations or a network share - creating more problems. With an email archiving solution, all emails are stored off the server yet easily accessible. The problems associated with PST files are also solved. Legal safeguard / compliance Legisl... [download for more]
