There is an impending email management crisis that will impact most organizations in the coming year and beyond. Users are sending more emails of greater length and with more attachments. Sheer volume alone would be cause for alarm yet the email problem has been compounded as businesses rely on it for their most critical business functions; courts have declared emails a discoverable form; data stores spiral out of control; and management, archiving, and recovery are at their height of importance.

Many companies will not proactively address these challenges head-on until they develop into true crises. Before starting the New Year, take some time to read below and understand these issues, then consider ways to better prepare your company and minimize the impact of any coming challenge.

By 2009, the number of email messages sent is expected to double, from 64.9 to 120 billion. Given the critical role of email in most organizations, IT managers are realizing that successful email management is key for job security. The grand slam of email issues is performance, disaster recovery, compliance, and e-discovery.

Each of these issues is becoming an increasing challenge for IT administrators. First, email systems were not designed for long-term storage and as a result, performance is negatively impacted if email storage thresholds are not managed properly. When systems are down, so is productivity, which can negatively affect bottom lines.

Tough new requirements are forcing organizations to develop retention policies that enable them to meet the new mandates. With CIOs and CEOs being held liable for compliance, jobs and corporate well being are on the line. E-discovery is the latest burden that CIOs are shouldering. Through 2010, companies that have not adopted formal e-discovery processes will spend nearly twice as much on gathering and producing documents as they will on legal services.

With this background in mind, let's take a closer look at seven emerging email management problems:

1. Email Disaster Recovery
Many organizations can maintain operations when email is down for only a few minutes. Unfortunately, outages frequently last longer than this. With survey results showing that in any given one year period there is a 75% likelihood of an unplanned email outage, the question becomes not if your email will go down, but when. The average duration of email outages varies from one hour to over 48 hours. Now that email is a business-critical application, outages of as little as one hour are generally unacceptable.

2. Managing Complex Email Retention and Deletion Policies
Under most U.S. laws and regulations, email messages are considered business records. As such, they are subject to a variety of internal rules that dictate how they are retained and destroyed. IT must protect selected email records from destruction or manipulation to comply with legal and regulatory mandates. At the same time, they must delete unneeded emails to prevent unnecessary use of data stores.

To make things more complex, there is no consensus between departments on how retention policies should be applied. Typically, there are four distinct interest groups, each with a unique perspective on email archiving:

• Users: Believe that they need to keep everything, forever.
• IT: Need to balance the cost of storage with management and system capabilities and costs.
• Legal: Prefer the most minimal retention possible to reduce risks and e-discovery costs but often mandate longer retention periods to comply with regulations.
• Compliance: Desire long retention to assure that no legally mandated records are inadvertently deleted.

3. Complying with e-Discovery Requests
E-discovery is any process in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intention of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal case. The discovery of electronic documents is becoming a critical trend in litigation. Many firms cite e-discovery as their number one legal concern. The costs of identifying email records as part of a discovery process is extremely high, however. In the case of Murphy Oil USA, Inc. v. Flour Daniel, Inc., emails from more than 700 employees were requested. The emails had been saved to 93 back up tapes and cost the organization $6.2 million to restore and six months of their time.

4. Controlling Exchange Data Store Growth
According to Radicati Research, the number of emails is expected to double by the year 2009 growing to 120 billion messages. The size of emails is also growing due to increases in the numbers of emails with attachments and an increase in the size of those attachments. A recent Osterman survey found that with the average user sending 15-16 megabytes per day, a 5,000-person organization can experience 75 gigabytes of email daily. Consequently the need for storage is growing proportionately.

The rapid growth in the size of messages stores leads to the following problems for email administrators:

• Slow Backup and Recovery
• Complex Maintenance
• Expensive Storage

5. The PST "Time Bomb"
In an effort to deal with the onslaught of email traffic, organizations have explored several options — setting mailbox limits, requiring users to archive their own emails, or deleting all emails after a specified period of time. None of these options have been effective. Users object to mailbox size restrictions and frequently begin underground archiving, refuse to archive emails, and put companies at risk with regulators holding them culpable for stored emails that were missed during legal discovery searches.

6. The Security Administration Burden
Five years ago, the top issue for email administrators was eliminating spam and viruses. By 2005, most organizations had implemented solutions that effectively eliminated spam and viruses from their email environment. However, by late 2006, many of these solutions had become complex to manage and had failed to keep up with the rapid evolution of spamming techniques.

7. Managing Wireless Devices
An increasing number of employees are going mobile and relying on wireless devices as their primary email connection. In fact, the growth of wireless devices is far outpacing the growth of traditional email. Mission-critical personnel represent the greatest portion of wireless device users and because they are important, they have a strong need for constant access to information. In many organizations, access for wireless users is far more critical than for any other group. Consequently, these employees are more negatively affected when the email system is down.

Is there a solution to these growing challenges? Find out more here about the details of these 7 key challenges of managing email, and read about how many companies today are addressing these issues, in the white paper: The Email Management Crisis: New Research on Seven Critical Email Management Problems. Download the full white paper here: www.messageone.com/s325.