A Look at Email Archiving Options

Email archiving has become one of the leading drivers for purchasing additional storage. The increased reliance on email as a communications mechanism, a growing number of legal regulations, and an ongoing desire to improve system productivity have sparked sales. Osterman Research expects worldwide revenue for email archiving systems to grow from $609 million in 2008 to $1.5 billion in 2011.

While email archiving deployments have become a growing phenomenon, they still remain shrouded in mystery for some. These systems are quite expensive, so many businesses pass them up rather than pay up. In addition, the products can be difficult to use at times, and there has been a fair amount of turbulence among vendors. Despite those issues, the market for these products looks very promising.

No one doubts the volume of email messages will continue to grow. Increasingly, firms are setting up virtual offices where employees are scattered around a state, across the nation, or even on the other side of the ocean. Studer Group, a healthcare consulting group, has about 200 employees, and two thirds of them work remotely. "Our employees rely heavily on email to exchange information," says Shawn Fletcher, a network administrator at Studer Group, which uses an email archiving system from Mimosa Systems.

With such a reliance comes the need to track messages. Busy executives may have hundreds or even thousands of important correspondences and need a simple way to find needed items. The email archiving tools include search tools to help with meet that requirement.

In addition, information can be accidentally deleted. Users want to be able to retrieve a deleted message with a simple press of a few buttons, but that often is not the case. Without an email archiving system, the process of retrieving a message can often take a few days -- compared to less than an hour or just a few seconds and a few quick clicks of a mouse on an email archiving system.Despite the advantages, many companies still have not installed an email archiving system. A September 2008 survey conducted by Osterman Research on behalf of Proofpoint found that three out of five companies do not have an archiving system in place, and 15 percent do not have plans to deploy one. So, why wouldn't a company buy an email archiving system?

In general, the need for these systems is evident more among large enterprises than small and medium businesses. They may not understand the challenges and potential risks involved in not providing easy access to their messages, or they consider themselves too small to become embroiled in legal problems. Yet, Proofpoint's survey found that employee email had been subpoenaed at 15 percent of companies with 500 or fewer employees during the last year.

Another hurdle with these systems is cost. Typically, pricing starts at the $10,000 mark, and can quickly run into the six-figure range and often pass $1 million. In industries such as financial services, companies may face heavy fines if they do not have strong email archiving policies in place, so they can quickly justify the expenditure. Other businesses may not find the cost justification process as simple, especially in these difficult economic times.

As the market has matured, vendors have been trying to streamline their systems, simplify deployment, and reduce their costs. "There has been a big push among email archiving vendors to go after the small and medium business market sector," says Michael Osterman, a principal analyst with Osterman Research.

Service providers are offering archiving-as-a-service as one way to reduce prices by spreading the needed infrastructure costs among a large group of customers. This option is gaining traction in the email archiving space. These services now account for one third of the market revenue, but will be responsible for two thirds in 2011, according to Osterman Research.Another change in this evolving market is the entrance of well established suppliers into the marketplace. During the past few years, CA, EMC, and Symantec moved into the market by gobbling up startup vendors. These well established companies understand that they need to add email archiving solutions to their product lines to meet the needs of their customers. That is another reason why the outlook for email archiving systems is bright.

Here is a sampling of some of the email archiving products and services available on the market today: