Survive the E-Mail Flood with Better Storage

If each e-mail was a drop of water, your company would likely find itself in the midst of a flood. That's because e-mail has moved beyond business convenience into the role of strategic communication tool.

Along with all of its tremendous benefits, however, e-mail systems have also introduced various challenges. Not only does your business need near-constant uptime on this mission-critical resource -- without negatively impacting network performance -- you also need help with complex challenges, such as:

Storage - Businesses' need for e-mail storage resources is increasing almost 30 percent annually. Why? Many e-mail messages contain archive-worthy business information. A growing number of e-mails also include attachments and large multimedia files, which rapidly fill up mail servers.

Access - Timely retrieval of e-mails once they're stored is becoming increasingly necessary. A recent survey by Osterman Research found that during the past three years, 75 percent of IT organizations were required to search through backup tapes to retrieve one or more e-mails in response to a legal or HR request.

Compliance - Federal, state and local statutes now require electronic documents and e-mail messages to have the same formal security and on-demand availability as written records. Therefore, your company may need help ensuring it can index, retain and audit e-mails for prescribed periods of time.

Technology to the Rescue
Despite the torrent of e-mail complexities, e-mail archiving solutions can keep your head above water.

These software and hardware solutions can help your company effectively perform e-mail recovery, availability, compliance and archive functions. Plus, these offerings eliminate the need for you to feed an inefficient process by regularly buying more e-mail servers.

Just what solutions are available today to help you manage your e-mail?

We may suggest a scalable data-preservation unit as an all-in-one way to sort and archive e-mail. These affordable devices continually retrieve e-mails directly from mail servers and maintain only one copy of any attachment, avoiding duplicates and wasted storage space. Plus, your e-mails are indexed to tape -- making them immediately available for retrieval in a manner compliant with corporate policies, as well as industry regulations.

If your company simply needs archiving software, we can help you with that, too. Archiving software keeps customers' Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange systems from growing unmanageable by automatically extracting old and inactive files, and delivering them to back-end data repositories. Storing documents in a secure, central electronic archive enables users to quickly access stored documents and protect against unauthorized access.

This software performs automated, policy-controlled e-mail archiving to online stores for active retention and seamless retrieval of information. The built-in search and discovery capabilities are complemented by specialized client applications for corporate governance, risk management and legal protection.

These scalable applications deliver archiving of e-mail and instant messages, while supporting all major messaging environments, including Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino. Furthermore, they reduce storage costs and increase server performance by migrating e-mail messages and attachments into a centralized message archive. Some applications also manage and retain e-mail as a record of business in order to achieve regulatory compliance.

You may not be able to stop your flow of e-mails, but you can survive the flood with e-mail archiving solutions. Call us today to discuss how we can help.

The Impact of VoIP
If your company has recently adopted a VoIP solution with unified messaging, your e-mail storage needs may be growing exponentially.

That's because unified messaging, which converts voice mails to e-mail messages, can quickly multiply e-mail traffic -- potentially overloading your mail servers and slowing performance.

Since unified messaging was never designed to assist with e-mail management, it can create serious headaches. However, we can propose an e-mail archiving strategy that can help you handle this increased e-mail traffic with ease.

What E-Mail Solutions Can Help You Do

Automatically store messages - E-mail systems often suffer when individual mailboxes become bulky with attachments. Hierarchical storage management (HSM) software periodically extracts messages from the server and stores them on an external archive.

Eliminate duplicate messages - Automated software removes duplicate e-mail attachments (which make up 70 percent of overall e-mail data), thus reducing the size of your archive and decreasing your storage costs.

Reduce hardware expenditures - Instead of buying expensive disk upgrades for messaging systems, you can use automated software tools that optimize mail systems you already have.

Save labor - The process of repeatedly backing up static e-mail data is costly and inefficient, placing a strain on your backup resources, network infrastructure , servers and administrative personnel.

Manage .PST and .NSF files - Many e-mail users make their own local copies of data and store them in personal archives, but this practice creates duplicate files and gives your e-mail administrators little control over backup. Hierarchical storage management (HSM) software eliminates these unstable archives by transferring files to a central repository.