UK businesses overlook email archiving

Email archiving is still in its infancy, according to a new survey released today by C2C, the enterprise email archiving vendor.

Despite forecasts from analyst IDC that email archiving applications will enjoy an annual growth rate of 23.4 per cent until 2011, only a small percentage of the companies polled by the software vendor have any such system in place, although interest levels are high.

The survey results suggest 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 growing market.

C2C said the recently conducted third-party email archiving and management survey featured hundreds of respondents, including network administrators, system managers and other IT personnel from organisations of all sizes. They were asked questions about their company's email infrastructure and the methods they use to archive email data for long-time retention and regulatory compliance requirements.

Just under a quarter (24 per cent) of respondents named an email archiving product or solution when asked to describe their current email archiving solution, while 37 per cent were under the impression that using Outlook .PST files is the same as email archiving, while 39 per cent 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, with 85 per cent of respondents in agreement. This is followed by the ability to restore archived data to any convenient device and provide immediate access to the recovered data with 78 per cent of respondents agreeing to each.

The most important applications for email archiving solutions is the integration with system management applications (84 per cent) and security and storage management applications (82 per cent each), demonstrating that today's companies want their email archiving integrated with other parts of their corporate system.

A surprising 47 per cent of those surveyed said they never check the integrity of access to mailboxes for any level of employee, including executive-level staff. C2C found this figure shocking given the amount of hacking and general system abuse and the fines handed out by regulators for failure to keep data secure and available.

"I am surprised by the casual attitude taken with mail system security and the retaining of important data in PSTs," said Dave Hunt, C2C's chief executive.

"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."

According to the research, the most problematic issues facing organisations include increasing back up and restore times (59 per cent); costs associated with messaging-related storage (53 per cent); finding messages and message content (51 per cent); and poor email server performance and use of .PST files (49 per cent each).

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