Experts identify email archiving trends for 2011
Contributed by Debbie Howlett
(Monday, December 13, 2010) |
Category :
Email archiving
Email archiving as an industry has taken off in recent years. Regulatory compliance standards, coupled with vast amounts of emails produced by enterprise users, have forced companies to focus on efforts to properly store and retain messages.
But needs and litigation requirements are constantly evolving, requiring companies and all employees involved to get more out of an email archiving solution. A vendor of email archiving services and solutions recently identified several trends that will shape the storage industry in 2011.
"Over the past few years, email archiving has gone beyond solely meeting compliance and legal discovery requirements and transformed itself into a tool that can provide enterprises with a variety of other benefits, including more effective mailbox management, enhanced end-user productivity and fully integrated data loss protection," said Brian Babineau, senior consulting analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
Many of the predicted trends revolve around access to stored email. As eDiscovery becomes more closely monitored and email archiving becomes a company-wide tool, the ability to access data easily will become more important.
According to the report, email end-users will demand access to their archived email as unlimited mailboxes. Employees will want the ability to access their archived messages without IT intervention, thus saving time wasted on both ends. In efforts to comply with inbox quota policies, many employees spend between 15 and 30 minutes each day organizing their mailbox. It is important for companies to avoid wasting more precious time by continuing to involve IT on such issues.
Legal teams also require better access to email archives to keep pace with a deluge of eDiscovery requests. According to the report, about 75 percent of legal discovery cases involve email, meaning archiving solutions with fully integrated legal discovery workflows continue to be in high demand.
"In keeping with this trend, 2011 will see more companies turning to their email archive to help increase their agility in responding to pending litigation," the report states.
Companies can accomplish this with the ability to delegate reviewer-only access, create and manage matters, implement granular and dynamic legal holds, comb data and export search results for early case assessment, according to the report. All this will save them both time and money when responding to litigation.
Mobile access to email archives will also emerge next year. Enterprise mobility is becoming a focus for organizations in various industries. More employees are tapping into email and other company data through smartphones and tablet computers, and in 2011 they will want access to archived email.
These considerations will almost certainly factor into a company's decision when selecting an email archiving solution. Companies will want email archives to be accessed from employees' desktop, laptop and mobile devices.
This notion may breed concerns over the security of such information on mobile devices, which is why companies will seek to improve data-leak prevention measures for email archives. As more email is produced, the more valuable the information becomes. Protecting that information becomes even more important to avoid data breaches that are costly in terms of both time and resources spent recovering data and paying possible fines. And that doesn't factor in embarrassment to the company that could be the worst result of all.
Companies are constantly finding themselves battling the email flood. Whether forced by regulations, storage constraints or simply to keep the sanity of their employees, companies and organizations in all industries must ensure email is properly retained. The challenges in doing so far outweigh the price that may be paid later on in the form of legal sanctions. Last year, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority handed out $50 million in noncompliance fines.
