Email management: Keeping the Business Bloodlines Flowing
Richard Ellis, manager UK & Ireland, Iron Mountain Digital warned IT departments that ignoring the growth of e-mail data are putting business continuity at risk.
Even with the rise of new collaboration technologies, e-mail remains the blood flow of the business. The faster it flows, the faster business happens and so it is little surprise that e-mail data is growing daily – up to 30% annually according to some industry analysts.
E-mail tends to be considered a commodity that, like water in our taps, ‘just happens’. Unfortunately things are not that simple, not least for the IT manager who has to deal with a multitude of issues that the dependency on e-mail creates. From downtime to time-consuming recovery or investigation processes, to the growing cost of e-mail storage, e-mails have the potential to be an IT nightmare.
Reiterating this point, a recent poll of IT managers conducted by Iron Mountain in the UK found that e-mail management remains a key issue for a large majority.
The survey showed that e-mail downtime proved to be the key concern, with over a third – 36% – stating that they had experienced e-mail failure in the past 12 months, and 25% of those experiencing downtime lasting over 12 hours. The impact of this on the business operation will no doubt be a concerning thought for any C-level executive.
E-discovery also proved to be a major time investment for respondents to the survey. 42% of IT managers have recovered e-mails to support an investigation, a quarter of whom spent over 12 hours doing so.
Much of this time recovering email for eDiscovery comes from the need to restore backup tapes to search for potentially responsive emails and attachments. Restoring backup tapes to search for email is extremely time consuming and costly.
Another large cost of eDiscovery of email is the need to search custodian desktops and laptops for PST files. Unless the organization has banned the creation of PSTs and monitored the infrastructure to make sure they do not exist, you may be required to search everywhere they could be stored.
For the discovery reason alone, a managed ESI archive, including email, is a great eDiscovery risk reducer as well as a way to lower your organization’s eDiscovery costs.
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Tags: backup tape, e-discovery, e-mail, eDiscovery, electronic discovery, Email, ESI, iron mountain, IT, PST, Risk
