independent survey results today released by C2C, the leading supplier of
enterprise email archiving software. While IDC forecasts email archiving
applications to see an annual growth rate of 23.4 percent through 2011,
only a small percentage of the companies polled have a solution in place,
but the interest level is high. User time constraints, costs, search
ability and recovery are among the most problematic factors in email
management and are escalating interest and activity in this rapidly growing
market.
The recently conducted third-party email archiving and management survey
featured hundreds of respondents, including network administrators, system
managers and other IT personnel from organizations of all sizes, who were
asked questions pertaining to their company’s email infrastructure and the
methods they use to archive email data for long-time retention and to
satisfy regulatory compliance requirements.
Among the survey’s findings:
• Only 24 percent of respondents named an email archiving product or
solution when asked to describe their current email archiving solution.
Thirty-seven percent were under the impression that using PSTs is the same
as email archiving, while 39 percent confuse backup and email archiving.
• The most important consideration of email system recovery and data
re-acquisition is the time to restore email system availability (85 percent
of respondents agreeing) with the ability to restore archived data to any
convenient device with immediate access to the recovered data (78 percent
of respondents agreeing to each).
• Fifty-seven percent of respondents want to do ‘live’ searches before
archiving, with 13 percent saying they see no need for searching email
content at all. The remaining 30 percent only want to search archived
content. Most of the archiving solutions available today do not provide the
ability to do live searching.
• The most important applications for email archiving solutions is to
integrate with system management applications (84 percent) and security and
storage management applications (82 percent each), demonstrating that
today’s customer wants their email archiving integrated with other parts of
their corporate system.
• An amazing 51 percent of system administrators do not consider relying on
PST files as a problem.
• Forty-seven percent of those surveyed said they never check the integrity
of access to mailboxes for any level of employee, including C-level
employees. This is a stunning figure given the amount of hacking and
general system abuse and the fines handed out by SEC and other
organizations for failure to keep data secure and available.
• Of respondents answering ‘important,’ ‘very important,’ or ‘of greatest
importance,’ the most problematic issues facing organizations include
increasing backup and restore times (59 percent); costs associated with
messaging-related storage (53 percent); finding messages and message
content (51 percent); and poor email server performance and use of .PST
files (49 percent each).
“It is always interesting to see the results of surveys like this one that
report ‘real world’ usage of email applications in a way that many people
might find surprising from any preconceived notions they may have,” said
Dave Hunt, CEO at C2C. “I am surprised by the casual attitude taken with
mail system security and the retaining of important data in PSTs. I would
venture to say that those who have left these holes in their email
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.”
C2C’s Archive One solution helps organizations solve the headaches of email
capacity management, enforce email retention policies and comply with
various regulatory requirements regarding the use and retention of email,
such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Freedom of Information Act, HIPAA,
Gramm-Leach-Bliley, SEC and NASD Directives. Archive One technology is
built on a proprietary advanced analytical search and policy enforcement
engine, made up of nearly 50 analysis criteria used throughout the product
line to centralize, automate and accelerate tasks which reduce risk
associated with email and improve system usage.
