E-mail archiving still in its infancy: C2C 11 July, 2007 By Chris Talbot

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E-mail has become an increasing important part of business. IDC research has discovered that nearly 70 per cent of corporate data resides in e-mail. Additionally, the amount of e-mail being sent increases 20 to 25 per cent every year, while the size of individual e-mails on average increased 15 to 25 per cent each year, said Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C, a supplier of enterprise e-mail archiving software. E-mail is growing exponentially, and many businesses don't understand what their e-mail and storage needs are going to be even two years down the line.

"People do not understand some of the requirements for running an e-mail system," Hunt said.

Based on its own survey, as well as data released from research firms like IDC, it's clear that the e-mail archiving market is still in its infancy, Hunt said. C2C surveyed hundreds of IT personnel from businesses of all sizes on e-mail archiving and management. Of those surveyed, only 24 per cent were able to name an e-mail archiving product or solution when asked to describe their current e-mail archiving solution. In fact, 37 per cent were under the impression that PST files were the same as e-mail archiving, and 39 per cent confuse backup and e-mail archiving.

"Everybody knows they have to do something, but the number of people who have actually got around to doing something isn't that high," Hunt said.

Research firms predict that the e-mail archiving market will be valued at over $1 billion in 2010, and Hunt said that businesses today are talking about the technology and its benefits. It's a technology that's still in its infancy, but it's going to grow quickly.

"It's just in its growth phase, and I think what we're seeing is that growth phase at the moment," he said.

According to the survey, the most important consideration of e-mail system recovery and data re-acquisition is the time to restore e-mail system availability (85 per cent of respondents agreed) with the ability to restore archived data to any convenient device with immediate access to the recovered data (78 per cent of respondents agreed to each).

The most important applications of e-mail archiving, according to the respondents of the survey, is to integrate with system management applications (84 per cent), and security and storage management applications (82 per cent each), which C2C stated shows that customers want their e-mail archiving products to be integrated with other parts of their corporate systems.

Additionally, 57 per cent of respondents said they wanted to be able to do "live" searches before archiving, with only 13 per cent saying they see no need for the ability to search e-mail content at all. Thirty per cent said they want to search archived content. However, most archiving products on the market don't offer "live" searching capabilities, Hunt said.

C2C also found that 51 per cent of system administrators don't consider relying on PST files to be a problem. PSTs, which are storage files created with the likes of Exchange and Outlook to back up old e-mails so that they're not all sitting in a mailbox (which typically has a maximum quota), tend to be very large files that are easily corrupted. However, many organizations simply rely on PSTs to back up e-mail, Hunt said.

"PST files are just bad practice," he said, adding that restricting employees with mailbox quotas is also a bad idea.

Since e-mail archiving is still in its infancy, despite many organizations' need for such products to meet compliance requirements, only a few businesses have made the jump to an e-mail archiving product. Part of this is that they have a lot of misconceptions about e-mail archiving, but there are other limiting factors, as well.

"I think the biggest hurdle is trying to marry up what it is that they want to do with the solutions that are out there. A lot of the solutions will constrain the way the company is going to work, which is totally the wrong thing to do," Hunt said.

It's important for businesses to look at e-mail archiving products that fit the way they do business, he said.

"I am surprised by the casual attitude taken with mail system security and the retaining of important data in PSTs," Hunt said. "I would venture to say that those who have left these holes in their e-mail management probably feel that it is too difficult or time consuming to perform these operations better. Solutions such as our Archive One can definitely help. I doubt if C-level management is really aware of the exposure their companies have."