End Email Chaos: An Introduction To Email Data Management - Industry Trend or Event

Computer Technology Review, May, 2001 by Chris Gray

Editor's note: The following is excerpted from a Special Report published by OTG Software.

Email is now the information lifeblood of business. It is so reliable, fast, inexpensive, and widely accessible that it has displaced traditional corporate communication systems--including postal services, couriers, faxes, and to a lesser extent, telephones--and become an integral part of daily business operations. In fact, it has become a treasure trove of information critical to the ongoing success of the enterprise--now holding an estimated 60% of the average company's most vital business data (up from 33% in 1999).

Unfortunately, business email is quickly becoming a victim of its own success. While email volume continues to grow at exponential rates, its value as a business tool and data center is being seriously compromised by a lack of centralized administration and record management inherent to traditional communications systems.

With no central control or administrative support for classifying, indexing, filing, storing, and retrieving the 3.5 billion email messages that U.S. businesses are transmitting daily, it's no surprise that everyone is experiencing some sort of fallout.

A Recipe For Email Chaos

The tidal wave of email is affecting everybody, from users and IT administrators, to management and record keeping professionals. Typical users find themselves swamped with an average of 70 email messages per day. They can barely find time to respond, never mind devise a method for managing their personal email archives.

Thus, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate information when it's needed, and users spend countless hours searching for or reproducing data that is often inaccessible or lost. Over 80% of end users cannot retrieve archived emails without the help of an IT administrator. Even with IT assistance, 26% of companies still cannot retrieve emails from backup.

As a result, the burden on IT administrators continues to grow. The average IT administrator spends 5-6 hours each week recovering old messages for end users. (For messages that are a year old, it can take an email administrator more than 11 hours to recover a year-old message from an archive.) Limited processing and storage capacity of workstations further hinders the ability of users to accomplish their business objectives. Research shows that a typical 3,000-user email system handles more than one terabyte of message traffic annually.

In addition, IT administrators spend another eight hours each week backing up and archiving emails so that burgeoning message stores do not bog down the email servers. Because end users don't want to discard messages, there is a constant struggle to provide adequate storage space without compromising system reliability. Not only are IT managers responsible for ensuring continuous availability of the server, they must protect email communications during and following virus attacks.

Meanwhile, management needs to protect confidential information contained in email from loss, theft, or inappropriate disclosure. Just as important is an email policy that prevents the waste of employee time and computer resources due to junk mail, spam, chain mail, and other frivolous or nonproductive mail. One multinational company placed the cost of junk mail at one dollar per employee per day.

Finally, despite the fact that email is an integral part of business communication, the lack of administrative control over email jeopardizes record management procedures and the ability to comply with regulatory and legal requirements. Without a formal filing and retention policy, past emails become a maze of unrelated communications that make responding to legal discovery and FOIA requests time consuming and costly. So time consuming and costly, in fact, that many organizations opt to risk noncompliance or settle disputes rather than incur the expense of retrieving archived email.

Current Practices In Email Data Management

In an average office, each user is currently responsible for managing and archiving the estimated 300MB of email received on his or her desktop annually. Even when desktop archive utilities and training are provided, the results vary according to individual user needs and work habits, especially given the lack of formal policies on message categorization or retention. The lack of formal retention policies also contributes to swollen message stores, as users dislike discarding messages, which can lead to service shutdown. Therefore, an unmanaged collection of personal archives and over-full mailboxes is not in the best interests of the organization.

With responsibility for email system performance and availability, the IT department is concerned with preventing over-full message stores--a serious and routine threat to email server performance. Because one email server houses the mailboxes of multiple users in an organization, the server can easily fill up, resulting in a system shutdown, and consequently cutting off email service to those users. To safeguard against overfull message stores and ensure removal of old messages, current IT practices include sending "delete your messages" notices to all users, or blind purging of the message stores. In the case of Microsoft Exchange, which accounts for approximately 50% of the email market, the send and receive services are shut down when the message store exceeds its limit (after administrative notices have been sent). In addition to reducing the volume of messages on the server, such practices also encourage IT organizations to implement guidelines that treat old email messages as potential liabilities and recommend actively removing them from server message stores.