Tuesday, 07 September 2010
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| Monday, 30 July 2007 | |
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Although e-mail is undisputedly a communication mainstay of the modern enterprise, few businesses yet have archiving or restoration systems…
Notwithstanding the reliance by modern businesses on e-mail – one Radicati Group estimate is that the average business user sends and receives 170 messages per day – little is yet being done to systematise its archiving or recovery if lost. According to independent survey results released by supplier of enterprise e-mail archiving software C2C, while IDC forecasts e-mail archiving applications to see an annual growth rate of 23.4% through 2011, only a small percentage of companies polled currently have a solution in place (although the level of interest is high). Among the survey’s findings: · only 24% of respondents named an e-mail archiving product or solution when asked to describe their current e-mail archiving solution. 37% were under the impression that using Personal Storage File (.PSTs) is the same as e-mail archiving, while 39% confuse back-up and e-mail archiving · the most important consideration of email system recovery and data re-acquisition is the time to restore e-mail system availability (85% of respondents agreeing) with the ability to restore archived data to any convenient device with immediate access to the recovered data (78% of respondents agreeing to each) · 57% of respondents want to do ‘live’ searches before archiving, with 13% saying they see no need for searching e-mail content at all. The remaining 30% 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 e-mail archiving solutions is to integrate with system management applications (84%) and security and storage management applications (82% each), according to C2C demonstrating that today’s customer wants their e-mail archiving integrated with other parts of their corporate system · 51% of system administrators do not consider relying on .PST files as a problem · 47% of those surveyed said they never check the integrity of access to mailboxes for any level of employee, including C-level employees. This, says C2C, is a stunning figure given the amount of hacking and general system abuse and the fines handed out by US Securities and Exchange Commission and other organisations for failure to keep data secure and available · of respondents answering ‘important,’ ‘very important,’ or ‘of greatest importance,’ the most problematic issues facing organisations include increasing backup and restore times (59%); costs associated with messaging-related storage (53%); finding messages and message content (51%); and poor e-mail server performance and use of .PST files (49% each). “It is always interesting to see the results of surveys like this one that report ‘real world’ usage of e-mail applications in a way that many people might find surprising from any preconceived notions they may have,” says C2C ceo Dave Hunt. “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 e-mail management probably feel that it is too difficult or time consuming to perform these operations better.” The Radicati Group estimates that the total e-mail archiving market (including both on-premises archiving solutions and hosted archiving services) will reach almost US$1.3mn by the end of 2007, and grow to over US$6bn by 2010. The IT research company also reckons that, geographically, the majority of archiving solutions (over 60%) today is being sold in But is archiving enough to keep the enterprise ship on a steady keel? The new ‘In-Depth, Objective Analysis of the Messaging Industry’ authored by Dr. Sara Radicati, argues that e-mail disaster recovery is becoming increasingly essential to business continuity, and that as demand for e-mail disaster recovery solutions grows, vendors are developing more back-up and replication software, and offering services specifically targeted at maintaining enterprise e-mail servers, such as Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, and Novell GroupWise. Radicati says the e-mail disaster recovery (DR) market is still a young market with plenty of growth potential. Due to the constant threat of security breaches, natural disasters, mechanical malfunctions, and human error, more organisations today depend upon DR planning to ensure business uptime and to maintain their service level agreements (SLAs). According to Radicati the focus of DR software in recent years has shifted from the protection of production file servers towards the protection of production application servers, including e-mail servers. Because e-mail servers have increasingly become business-critical, e-mail disaster recovery solutions are becoming more prevalent in the marketplace, with particular concentration on popular enterprise messaging platforms. E-mail disaster recovery is a top priority among businesses, and more vendors are developing efficient solutions for e-mail server backup and replication. Though Continuous Data Protection (CDP) continues to be the preferred method of enterprise-class backup, e-mail replication methods have evolved over recent years, and now have the potential to outdo e-mail backup solutions in terms of DR performance and capability. Cemaphore Systems, Double-Take Software, and Neverfail are among some of the software vendors today that provide leading e-mail replication solutions. And in other e-mail news, according to AOL's third annual ‘Email Addiction’ survey, more Americans than ever before are using portable devices to keep tabs on their e-mail throughout the day and night, and from virtually anywhere – bed, cars, bathrooms and church. Sad or what? John Williamson |
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