How to Lower Email Costs While Increasing Reliability

How to Lower Email Costs
While Increasing Reliability sponsored by
An Osterman Research White Paper Published March 2009 SPONSORED BY

sponsored by
sponsored by Osterman Research, Inc. . P.O. Box 1058 . Black Diamond, Washington 98010-1058 Phone: +1 253 630 5839 . Fax: +1 866 842 3274 . info@ostermanresearch.com . www.ostermanresearch.com How to Lower Email Costs While Increasing Reliability
Evaluating Your Email Options
Email has become something of a critical utility, much like the electricity that powers our offices: it must be available 24 hours a day, it must provide reliable performance, and its cost must be reasonable. However, unlike electrical systems (at least from the user's perspective), email systems require significant amounts of labor to manage well. Email systems must periodically be upgraded. New hardware must be introduced as organizations migrate to new systems. Security must be maintained and upgraded to protect the system from intrusions. Additional hardware must be deployed to protect against outages that could seriously harm user productivity. Plus, unexpected events, such as spam storms or natural disasters can drive up costs substantially in ways that were not anticipated. This critical application has become the key communications and file transport vehicle for ®most individuals in business today. Microsoft Exchange, as the leading email platform in use in the workplace, is one of the key messaging systems upon which users and organizations rely to do their work. ®This white paper, sponsored by Concentric , discusses the critical nature of email and the importance of understanding the total cost of ownership for providing email. It also provides some examples of the cost of providing Exchange on-premise for organizations of various sizes developed from a cost model developed by Osterman Research. Finally, the white paper presents a brief overview of Concentric's hosted Exchange offerings. EMAIL IS STILL THE "KILLER APP" The average information worker, even in a small company, has a growing array of communication and collaboration tools at their disposal: email, instant messaging, Wikis, blogs, collaboration environments, mobile devices, and other tools. However, despite the growth in the availability of various communication tools, email The increasing use of email as continues to be the dominant method by which most information workers the transport system for files communicate. For example, puts a growing strain on both Osterman Research found in a 2008 survey of email end users that the the bandwidth devoted to average user in a smaller email and the storage that is organization sends and receives a mean of 124 emails on a typical required for it. workday. Further, the average user spends 35% of their time doing something in email - sending or receiving emails, looking for contacts or attachments, scheduling appointments, etc. - compared to only about 2% of their time doing work in instant messaging, for example. In addition, email has become the primary file transport mechanism for most users. Despite the availability of FTP and other file-sharing technologies, most users choose email as their preferred method for sending or receiving attachments. This has two important implications:
©2009 Osterman Research, Inc. 1 How to Lower Email Costs While Increasing Reliability
. The increasing use of email as the transport system for files puts a growing strain on both the bandwidth devoted to email and the storage that is required for it. Growth in email storage has consistently been the most serious problem cited by decision makers in numerous Osterman Research surveys over the past three years, both for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprises. . The growing proportion of attachments stored in email - many of which contain critical business documentation - is placing increased emphasis on archiving and other technologies that can store and retrieve this content quickly, easily, and inexpensively. MANY DECISION MAKERS UNDERESTIMATE EMAIL COSTS Osterman Research has found in numerous surveys that messaging decision makers often underestimate the cost of providing email to their users. For example, in a major survey of email d... [download for more]