Survey: 53% of Small Firms in U.S. Don’t Archive E-Mail


Written by pkirvan on August 27, 2008 in Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Vital Records.

A recently published survey of 421 IT executives at small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. found that 53 percent of those surveyed have not implemented an e-mail archiving system within their organizations. The research was carried out by eMediaUSA on behalf of GFI Software, a developer of e-mail archiving software.

The survey also found among those companies currently using an e-mail archiving solution, 35 percent are relying on end users to manage their own e-mail archives, 35 percent use an in-house solution to archive e-mails, and 33 percent use tape backups.

Top reasons given for retaining e-mails included

  • internal inquiries and investigations (39 percent);
  • backup (31 percent);
  • compliance (28 percent); and,
  • reducing the load of mail quotas on Exchange Server (27 percent).

Among the reasons given by SMBs who are not using an e-mail archiving solution included the company is too small to need an archiving product (26 percent); they are not impacted by compliance regulations (21 percent); no budget (26 percent); and e-mails are stored on the mail server (23 percent).

Other key findings from the survey include:

  • 5 percent archive e-mails indefinitely, while 21 percent keep them six months to a year
  • 47 percent have had to search for old or deleted e-mails because of compliance requirements
  • 29 percent say it typically takes less than an hour to find an e-mail from 15 months ago or longer
  • 40 percent do not feel they are sufficiently informed about compliance and e-mail archiving issues

On a positive note, the survey found that 36 percent of respondents consider e-mail archiving important, and 23 percent found it very important. Further, more than half that use an e-mail archiving solution have had a positive experience using it.

Don’t Forget Vital Records


Written by pkirvan on August 1, 2008 in Business Continuity, Vital Records.

Vital Records and Business Continuity

When is the last time you ]met with your company’s records manager?: What do you know about his/her needs? Is your firm migrating to an enterprise content management (ECM) strategy? If so, how will you integrate business continuity with this strategy? Dr. Jim Kennedy at Lucent has written a compelling discussion on the issues you must know regarding vital records. It’s no longer a matter of storing tapes and hard copies. Virtualization has changed the VR paradigm, and now is the time to get up to speed on this important activity.

The National Fire Protection Association publishes the principal standard for records management, NFPA 232: Standards for Protection of Records, Archives, Records Centers by National Fire Protection Association.