Data back up or data mining?
Email back up or data mining?With email now the de facto business communications standard, broadband presents the opportunity to easily and swiftly bulk store messages. Over the next 12 months the volume of email traffic is expected to increase significantly – adding further to the need to archive email for legal and marketing reasons. Network storage companies state email is the main driving factor for increased enterprise storage. Research suggests the data storage problem will only get worse; a view apparently shared by and estimated 75 per cent of end users. The Storage Networking Industry Association Europe (SNIA-E) says IT storage requirements are outstripping the two-fold increments of Moore’s law (computer speeds doubling every 12 months). Respondents to a survey carried out last year by the body revealed that 30 per cent experienced data storage needs go up by 100 per cent or more in the previous 12 months. The consensus opinion was that this growth was set to continue at roughly the same level in 2003. To a great extent the storage question has arisen due to users being very reluctant to delete emails they may require. Sifting through a tsunami of email and archiving the necessary messages, paradoxically, holds little appeal. It’s a time consuming and tedious task that tends to be left at the bottom of the ‘to do’ list when 100MB of email amounts to only a few weeks’ correspondence and Outlook Express can only handle around 200 to 250 message deletions at one go without falling over. Where broadband comes in is in the ability to easily securely store messages in bulk off site. The extra bandwidth makes possible the transfer of multi-megabytes of messages and attachments that would otherwise be totally impractical using a dial up connection. Depending on the size of your organisation, the storage solution can be as a simple as zipping the contents of your email folders on a weekly basis and uploading them onto web space. Or, at the other end of the scale, an email storage solution to manage the archiving, retention and retrieval of documents and email. It is an issue that is currently being taken ever more seriously as businesses worldwide generate an astonishing 16 billion emails every day. And along with the trend of 100 per cent growth annually in the volume of email traffic, the problem is further exacerbated by the file size of attachments spiralling and the mounting weight of legislation being enacted to regulate digital communications. At the coalface, all this means users having in-box quotas imposed upon them as companies struggle to cope under the pressure. Most companies have, or are in the process of implementing, email policies. The key issues being considered by such policies are:
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