Survey Says: Email Archiving Needed

July 4, 2007: According to a new survey from enterprise email archiving software developer C2C, despite IDC forecasting an email archiving application growth rate of 23.4 percent through 2011 the practice is still in its infancy.

C2C says that the email archiving and management survey canvassed the opinions of hundreds of respondents, including network administrators, system managers and other IT personnel from organisations of all sizes.

Candidates were quizzed about their company’s email infrastructure and the methods they use to archive email data for long-time retention and regulatory compliance requirements. Juxtaposing the growth forecasted by the analysts at IDC, C2C claims that only a small percentage of the companies polled have a solution in place, even if interest in email archival solutions is high.

The company says that time constraints, costs, searchability and recovery were cited as being the most problematic factors in email management, and are the main drivers behind increasing interest in archival solutions.

The survey found that a mere 24 percent of respondents named an email archiving product or solution when describing their current email archiving solution, while 37 percent were under the impression that using PSTs is the same as email archiving. A further 39 percent confused backup and email archiving.

The misuse of PSTs in archiving is one of the most surprising revelations, with a hefty 51 percent of system administrators not considering a reliance on PST files as a problem. Equally, if not more concerning though, is that 47 percent of respondents claimed they never check the integrity of access to mailboxes for any level of employee – a scary figure considering the amount of email breaches and security problems regularly making headlines.

Live searching was named as one of the most desired features with 57 percent saying they want to do ‘live’ searches before archiving, with 30 percent wanting to search archives only, and 13 percent seeing no need for email content searching at all.

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