Compliance Makes Headlines, but IT Efficiency Still Top Reason for E-Mail Archiving

31st March 2005

Compliance concerns may make the headlines, but system performance is still the top reason for email archiving.

A March 2005 survey by C2C’s Archive One division and Osterman Research polled 107 organizations and found that 63.2 percent of companies stated overloaded mailboxes as a driver to archive and manage email. More than 61 percent of respondents noted problems of increasing backup and restore times, and almost 53 percent mentioned increasing message size.

These results are not dramatically different from similar survey questions asked a year ago. In December 2003, 59 percent of C2C/Osterman survey respondents said that they were archiving to reduce server loads and improve system efficiency. At that time, the top three IT worries were increasing backup and restore times, increasing message size and lack of messaging-related disk space.

With the 2005 survey, compliance with government data retention statutes has edged out server performance as the number two driver for email archiving (59.8 and 54.2 percent, respectively), and enforcing an email retention or deletion policy is the third most serious problem for organizations

“Archiving is becoming a more critical concern to organizations as they are beginning to realize the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and the need for litigation/discovery support,” says Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, Inc., a market research firm in Black Diamond, WA.

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