Addressing the challenges of email management (page 1 of 2)

It's no surprise, then, that proactive organizations are taking steps to reduce storage costs, simplify management, enable instant search and discovery of email, and generally better manage email to ensure its security and availability. This article looks at email management challenges in detail, and then offers advice on streamlining email infrastructure management.

The quota system

When a corporation needs to manage email, what does it typically do? Generally, it will impose email quotas, restricting users to a limited amount of email storage. However, this tends to shift the problem rather than resolve it. Users must constantly ensure that their email storage is below the quota and store their excess messages in separate files (for example, PST files on Microsoft Exchange). In many cases, these files are kept on the network file servers and so continue to use storage and backup resources. In general, email quotas affect user productivity, result in large numbers of support calls, and are one of the burdens of email management.

Regulations are driving expanding retention periods

There are also growing email challenges related to regulatory compliance. Expanding records retention periods create additional challenges to ensuring the security and availability of this information—a common driver across regulations. The more there is to manage, the more challenges and risks are associated with ensuring the security and availability of this information.

Moreover, retention periods vary from regulation to regulation. Without controls in place, there is no way to classify this information upfront and determine the appropriate retention period.

Explosive growth

Compounding all these issues is the explosive growth of email in all businesses. According to The Radicati Group, the average user now sends 10MB of mail per day. And that doesn't take into account the dramatic rise of instant messaging (IM) in the enterprise. With email systems tightly monitored, unmanaged public IM networks are becoming a preferred medium for employees to send personal and sometimes inappropriate messages. The Radicati Group estimates that 85% of all enterprises have public instant messaging in use, but that only 12% of them have an enterprise solution for securing and managing IM.

Legal implications

The emergence of email as legal evidence is also pressing companies to demonstrate that their data is not only secure from tampering, but also that specific information is quickly retrievable to support the legal discovery process. Simple record retention alone is insufficient to meet the standards for accessibility.

The traditional way to restore required messages from backup tapes is a cost-prohibitive and time-consuming process. Manual tape restoration costs $2,000 to $5,000 per tape, resulting in total charges in typical litigation cases exceeding $200,000 per case.

The widely publicized Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories Inc. case illustrates how the legal-discovery process tests the way many companies manage email and other documents. Wyeth and its sister company, A.H. Robins Inc., were sued over the weight-loss drug combination fen-phen. Although the plaintiff sought relevant email messages from only a few of the defendant's employees, the company's tape backup system couldn't easily isolate the required information without incurring considerable cost, estimated to be between $1.1 million and $1.7 million. Faced with the cost of email discovery, and the possibility of losing despite such an effort, Wyeth settled with the plaintiff.