e-mail data management challenges surveyed

Mimosa Systems, Inc., has published the results of a commissioned survey conducted by Osterman Research. This was designed to capture the key e-mail management challenges facing enterprises in 2006. The survey found that ‘a major shift of power is taking place towards business users in response to the burden of managing e-mail’. Enterprises are seeking to ensure fingertip access, powerful search, electronic discovery and self-service recovery for end-users and compliance managers ‘who want continuous and unfettered access to vital enterprise e-mail - both current and historical, without relying on IT administrators’.

The majority of IT executives and staff surveyed said if they could enable business users to search, access and recover e-mail, it would greatly increase business user as well as IT administrator productivity.

Top five Exchange challenges
The top five Exchange challenges highlight that Exchange is now truly a mission critical application and enterprises need to manage e-mail as a business record.

The survey identified the top five e-mail data management challenges related to Exchange as:

1. Managing overall Exchange disaster recovery
2. Managing the size of Exchange Message Stores
3. Protecting .PST file data and searching individual .PST files for legal discovery
4. Restoring individual Exchange mailboxes and satisfying users' requests to recover deleted e-mail
5. Responding to legal requests to search email and capturing all email for compliance without impacting Exchange performance

The key finding was that enterprises had e-mail challenges that spanned multiple areas:

* Data protection and disaster recovery
* Archiving and compliance
* Search and discovery
* Information life cycle and storage management

"The interesting finding of our survey was that for 2006 enterprises are facing serious challenges across multiple areas of e-mail management," commented Michael Osterman, founder, Osterman Research. "The market is demanding solutions for holistic e-mail data management that go beyond a single feature or function."

Interestingly, three out of the top five Exchange challenges underscore that the primary drain on administrator time is managing users' requests to recover deleted mail and responding to HR manager, legal counsel and compliance officer requests to search e-mail.

The survey also reported that those enterprises that have implemented e-mail archiving solutions over the last few years have the following critical needs:

* Improving the performance and scalability
* Improving the search interfaces
* Enabling faster response to discovery requests
* Minimizing the impact of archiving on the production environment
* Archiving calendar, contact and other items in addition to email

An in-depth report on the survey can be found at: www.mimosasystems.com/emailsurvey.html

•Date: 19th Jan 2006• Region: US/World • Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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