Features - Enterprise Data Insights:
THE COST OF EMAIL
By Debbie Moffat
Data storage has become so cheap, why should anyone care about e-mail archive
management? After all, it's easy enough to buy additional disk drives for
your e-mail servers and move on to more important concerns…right? Wrong.
According to the Gartner Group, despite the fact that hardware costs will
continue to decline at about 25 percent to 35 percent per year, data storage
will eat up the majority of server-related budgets by 2004.
E-mail Drives the Demand for Data Storage
Driving the demand for data storage is the sheer volume of data being
generated, and e-mail leads the pack. This year, Americans will send and
receive well over 6.8 trillion e-mail messages, approximately 2.2 billion
messages each day, compared with just 293 million pieces of first class mail.
Although a portion of this e-mail is sent and received by individuals, most of
the traffic travels via corporate e-mail servers. As a result, the storage
costs associated with ever-growing e-mail can be significant.
Indeed, one needs only to look back to the mid-1990's when most e-mail
messages were between 1Kb and 3Kb in size. Today, the size of a typical e-mail
(without an attachment) is around 5Kb. Less than a decade ago file attachments
were rare, but today over 20 percent of e-mail comes with an attachment. As a
result, an average e-mail with an attachment is about 100Kb. This trend shows
no sign of slowing. Analysts estimate the size of e-mail and attachments is
growing at a rate of 35 percent per year. As a result, e-mail has become the
number one corporate storage hog. Many companies find that their e-mail server
storage capacity has tripled over the last 18 months.
E-mail Administration Drives Storage Expense
Buying storage technology isn't really the expensive part, however,
maintaining it is. The Gartner Group estimates that the purchase of storage
solutions accounts for only 20 percent of storage related expenditures. When
it comes to e-mail, administration tasks, like performing backups and
restoring user mailboxes, account for 43 percent of support costs. Add another
20 percent for the cost of downtime when e-mail systems crash or when messages
become corrupted, and the ever-growing demand for e-mail storage quickly
becomes a pressing financial concern.
In a study conducted by EDUCOM, we discovered that corporate e-mail systems
account for the lion's share of data administration costs. Out of the 926
organizations we surveyed, 97 percent said that their e-mail stores had grown
faster than predicted, in excess of 50 percent. Consequently, e-mail backups
consistently ran into production periods. For a majority of the companies we
surveyed restoring lost e-mail for a single user took over 24 hours to
complete.
The cost of e-mail administration, therefore, is a growing concern.
Organizations spend on average nearly $200 per user each year to locate and
retrieve lost e-mail from storage. When considering lost user productivity,
revenue loss, and administration and management costs, companies spend more on
e-mail archive management than for all technical support and help desk
combined. In light of the current and ongoing economic slowdown most
enterprises are pushing to understand and cut storage costs. Storage is now a
pain point for many organizations, and they are casting about for relief.
Improvements to E-mail Storage
One way to relieve e-mail overload on corporate servers is ensuring true
"single instance storage." By using e-mail management software, such as
EDUCOM's Exchange Archive Solution (EAS), organizations can make significant
improvements in their "vanilla" MS Exchange environment. While marketing
pundits often purport that Exchange facilitates single instance storage, the
truth is that message redundancy is often found across multiple mail stores, a
condition that was exacerbated with the release of MS Exchange 2000.
Single instance storage is only part of the strategic equation, however. Not
only is the volume of e-mail on the rise, but the size of e-mail and
attachments is increasing as well. EAS helps further reduce the demand for
e-mail storage by enabling on-the-fly file compression. Organizations find
that compressing archived messages saves another 50 percent (on average) of
archive space.
Even with the downward trend in the cost of data storage gear, the potential
savings in storage hardware when using e-mail management software are
noteworthy. Add to the equation reductions in administrative expense, the
ability to perform compliance audits efficiently, increased protection against
e-mail virus attacks, better fault tolerance, and more comprehensive disaster
recovery, and companies will find a quick return on their investment.
Author's Bio
Debbie Moffat is the Managing Director with EDUCOM TS Inc and a twenty-three
year IT veteran. Educom specializes in information technology, process
improvement and litigation risk and is an industry leader in the development
of software solutions focused on the mission-critical management of corporate
e-mail. EDUCOM products help clients establish e-mail retention policies,
protect corporate intellectual property, increase speed of information
retrieval, and reduce costly e-mail server overload. EDUCOM's flagship product
is Exchange Archive Solution (EAS), offering intelligent storage management
for Microsoft Exchange mail stores.
To learn more about EDUCOM TS Inc or the subject of e-mail management visit
www.educomts.com.
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