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MAIN POINTS
Email's importance continues to grow
The use of email has moved from simple interpersonal communications through to widespread financial and other sensitive information exchanges.
Email volumes continue to grow
Spam email continues to evolve, and volumes are growing strongly. Tools to manage the amount of email entering the company will provide benefits to users in having fewer emails to read, less security issues around malware, and multiple storage benefits.
Although storage is cheap, storage management is not
Governance is moving towards a view that once information hits an organisation's network, it must be stored for audit purposes. Therefore, spam and other content filtering tools must be utilised to minimise the storage of non-required (and possibly harmful) content.
Email downtime is no longer an option
Email is now a mission critical service within the organisation. Issues with system patching, upgrades and migration means that a company suffers. Having the capability to manage upgrades and migrations successfully can keep users connected - and therefore working.
It's time to revisit email
Email has rapidly evolved from a useful tool for interpersonal ad-hoc communication, through being a more formalised means of exchanging information to an integral part of an organisation's informational intellectual property.
During this evolution, we have also seen a massive change in the volumes of email being sent and received - and also in the types of email: we now receive emails with viruses, spyware and Trojans in the attachments and with messages trying to ascertain specific private information from us. This spam has grown to a point where around 80% of email being sent is spam - and so we are looking at massive volumes of rubbish going backwards and forwards on the network.
But, we are more dependent now on email than we ever have been - we are utilising email as a means of transacting business between our customers and ourselves, and between ourselves and our suppliers. A company email could well be the first thing a supplier or customer sees from the organisation - if the content is wrong, inappropriate or just badly worded, the impact on the company's brand and profile could be high. These emails often include financial transaction data - tracking this information is becoming increasingly important as we look to local, regional and global governance and audit requirements. We are increasingly committing highly sensitive information to email - it is fast, it is relatively dependable, and it is easily available.
We still use email as a communication tool, but the collaborative side of email has also grown. After trying many different tools such as document management, team rooms, portals and shared intranets, the majority of people still use email to send around work in progress for comment by their peers and review by their bosses. This has been forced through the remaining high price of formalised workflow tools - and that email can be easily called from within any application, or can easily accept output from any application as an attachment in a manner that is acceptable to the vast majority of people. Indeed, we also see that many users utilise email as a disaster recovery repository - if any of their systems goes down, another system will probably hold a good proportion of their work as attachments in email.
So, we now have a new problem with email - it is no longer a nice-to-have tool used by the few to impart information of low or dubious nature to others. It is now a business critical service carrying and holding information where loss could heavily impact the business. Therefore, for may email users, it is now time to review how we look at email, and how we put in place tools to manage the possible problems that we have with the rapid growth of email volumes, with the ever-present dangers of spam, of the need for content security and for centralised management of email systems, to be able to search across this information repository and to provide a more stable and scalable solution to the individual users and the organisation as a whole.
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