Insider: Email Archiving Hits Bottom

Email plays a big enough role in today's organizations that failure to manage it properly can literally bring down the house -- while archiving it effectively can boost success.

As this month's Byte and Switch Insider points out, email has become much more than a messaging service; it's also a repository for spreadsheets, videos, PDFs, and lots of unstructured text files.

What's more, the ability of email programs to organize information and interact with Web applications makes them vital to day-to-day operations. Email also now qualifies as an official type of business record, so failure to manage it properly could produce catastrophic losses of business function -- and even send someone to jail.

All this said, today's email programs, such as Microsoft Exchange, weren't designed for the tasks they're called on to perform. Unless IT pros implement effective archiving, email can overtake a server with files so large that the application topples, message data is corrupted, and response times on the corporate network are slowed.

The answer, according to the report, "Email Archiving: Who Does What," is to plan and implement effective email archiving. This calls for recognizing the value of investing in the right tools and techniques. The penalty for not putting in enough effort, or for treating email simply as another element to back up, can be, literally, disaster.For instance, effective archiving can shrink a user's storage requirements, consolidate server space, reduce backup and recovery time, and improve overall network performance and response time. All of these are quantifiable benefits. In contrast, if archiving is simply handled as one big file, the right things may not be saved, and the wrong things can interfere with overall IT well being.

Another "plus" to email archiving: the reduction in legal risk. Financial firms, healthcare providers, and other kinds of regulated businesses are responsible for treating email just like any other method of record-keeping. If the system is unreliable, that's no excuse in court. Indeed, it can lead to heavier penalties.

Once the importance of archiving is understood, the report states, it's easier to build an effective strategy. After all, if email is considered a corporate asset, it is a sensible next step to plan for how to selectively sift and store what needs to be saved, and to arrange for its easy retrieval.

In addition to describing the business case for email archiving, the report offers tips on how to effectively use, set up, and manage an email archive. It also delves into the various features and functions offered by products from the following vendors:

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch Email Archiving: Who Does What is available as part of an annual subscription (12 monthly issues) to Byte and Switch Insider, priced at $1,350. Individual reports are available for $900.

To subscribe, or for more information, please visit: www.byteandswitch.com/insider.

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Jeff Claudino

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For review copies, members of the media may contact:Gabriel Brown
Chief Analyst
Insider Research Services

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