Written by Paul Kirvan 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.
