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Over the past ten years, email has become the most important communications tool used in business. It is the primary communications medium for both external and internal communications ? significantly more important than the telephone ? and the one that users can least afford to be without.
However, the popularity and pervasiveness of email has created a very serious problem for organizations of all sizes: email was originally designed to send short, text-based messages. While that is still its basic purpose, email has also assumed the role of being the primary data and file transport system for most enterprises. As the sophistication and size of the attachments carried in email have grown, the number of problems for IT administrators and users alike have also grown. For example, large attachments sent through email can dramatically reduce the performance of messaging servers and can cause them to crash in some cases. Large attachments drive up storage costs and can require expensive upgrades to network bandwidth. The response from most IT departments has been to implement quotas on the size of mailboxes and/or limitations on the size of the attachments that can be sent through email. However, with increasing attachment sizes and size limits comes the burden on users to spend more time managing their mailbox to stay within the limitations imposed by IT. In fact, some users try to circumvent IT-imposed limits through the use of personal Webmail accounts and other means.
The better solution to this escalating problem is a paradigm shift with regard to email. Instead of treating ad hoc file transfer as just another function of the email system, it should instead be regarded as a core business process. Using solutions already available in the market, file transfer can be a parallel capability to email so that business users can send files more efficiently and so that IT does not have to worry about overburdening the email infrastructure.
The Problem with Email for File Delivery
The ease with which email can be used to send attachments makes it the most convenient file transfer mechanism available to business users today. Whereas several years ago most email users sent basic spreadsheets and presentations via email, today they are sending bigger versions of these files, as well as applications, databases, closing documents, engineering drawings, graphics, creative content, faxes and other large files. While sending files through email is very convenient, email systems were never designed to handle these attachments efficiently, resulting in degraded email server performance, slower message delivery times and other problems. Because as much as 80% of email traffic can be generated through attachments, solving the attachment problem is becoming increasingly critical for IT administrators and users.
One solution that has become common practice in most email environments is to put a limit on the size of file attachments and a quota on mailbox size. For example, in such an environment if the design office of a manufacturing company wants to send a 50MB design update to the overseas production operation, the email system cannot be used to send the file. Similarly, for users who send smaller attachments via email, there is the periodic pain of having to sort through the mailbox and determine what can be safely deleted because of the IT-imposed mailbox quota.
FTP and Other Alternatives
Business users do have a number of options for sending large files in the absence of their ability to do so through email, the most common of which is FTP. However, the fundamental problem with FTP as a business tool is that it is difficult to track file uploads and downloads. Plus, FTP is not as convenient for file transfer as email because it does not allow for ad hoc collaboration as email does. In short, users don't like FTP because it is difficult to use and IT doesn't like it because it is difficult to maintain.
Another option for sending large files that many users opt for is to send files via a personal Webmail account, such as Google Mail. However, the use of personal Webmail accounts generally bypasses corporate messaging security defenses and does not allow files to be tracked.
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