E-Mail Archiving for Smaller Businesses

E-mail pours into businesses every day and it never stops. How to turn that flood into an asset? By selecting an e-mail archiving system that meets their needs, smaller businesses can protect themselves from litigation, boost productivity, and ensure business continuity.

Worldwide, the amount of e-mail is staggering. And it just keeps growing: IDC estimates that the volume has increased from 9.7 billion in 2000 to 97 billion in 2007. That's per day, by the way.

In the face of this onslaught, businesses small and large ask themselves: What do we do with it all?

One method of dealing with the volume is to constrain storage space. According to Brian Babineau, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group, 65% of organizations take such a "mailbox quota" approach to managing the load and place size limits on employee mailboxes. Although this approach addresses physical storage space, it forces employees to continually sort, delete, and store their e-mail messages to stay under quota. That steals precious time from other projects. It also frustrates employees accustomed to using free Web mail applications that offer virtually unlimited storage.

Fortunately, there's another option: e-mail archiving. Many companies are turning to e-mail archiving to ease their messaging woes. An e-mail archiving system isn't just backup: rather, it's an always-accessible message storehouse that can be searched and retrieved on an individual basis, as needed, almost as easily as live e-mail. Furthermore, archiving systems preserve message metadata -- important information such as where an e-mail came from, when it was sent, and the server path -- that's lost when messages are simply copied to disc or tape.

Why Archive E-Mail?

Some companies have no choice -- they're required to archive their e-mail. For example, SEC regulations (which, Babineau points out, apply equally to small brokerages and large Wall Street investment firms) require that financial services companies preserve e-mail and attachments in a nonalterable, nonerasable, searchable format for up to seven years.

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Financial firms are hardly alone. Companies in other industries and locales also must comply with governmental regulations. "In the state of Florida, any correspondence with any public official is subject to public disclosure," says James Pelt, GIS/IT coordinator and network administrator for the city of Gulf Breeze, Fla. "Any citizen can request any e-mail of any official."

Pelt is required to keep all e-mails for at least five years. Before he installed an archiving system, Pelt relied on his Microsoft Exchange server's journaling feature to save a copy of all messages to a special mailbox. "Then once a month, I'd export that PST file, put it on a CD, label it, and file it. But the messages were just dumped into one big, undifferentiated mailbox."

Litigation preparedness is another common reason for archiving e-mail. Companies involved in lawsuits must be prepared to comply with "e-discovery" orders, or instructions to produce e-mails and other electronic information that might be relevant to the case. Some companies have been penalized millions of dollars and seen their legal positions damaged when they didn't produce old e-mails under court order.

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The benefits of e-mail archiving systems extend beyond regulatory compliance and litigation preparedness. Many companies also realize productivity gains such as faster network performance and reduced spam.

Next Page: On-Premise Archiving Means Quick Retrieval

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