E-mail is the lifeblood of many businesses today. And its importance continues to grow--into unwieldy proportions for some.

More and more users are choosing e-mail over the telephone for business communications, and an ever-increasing amount of critical information passes through a company's e-mail system each day.

In e-mails, financial expectations are discussed, deals are clinched, customers lodge complaints, companies make promises.

However, there is a downside, say analysts.

The demand on e-mail may be putting too much strain on a company's storage environment. If not addressed accordingly, business interruptions may result.

"E-mail storage has become a big challenge... because the size and volume of e-mail messages is growing faster than the software to run e-mail systems was designed to handle." Tom Zack, vice president, Marketing, Sales and Technical Operations, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems.

In some countries, new regulations now require companies to keep their e-mails for at least seven years. A growing number of businesses realize they need to save these messages, but it's not so simple.

You can't just pack old messages away like chucking receipts into a box at home. They need to be organized and easily accessible. When an archived message is needed, the management should not have to call in half the IT team just to find it.

Research firm IDC says that e-mails sent worldwide will multiply from 9.7 billion a day in 2000 to 35 billion in 2005, yet most companies are failing to address the problem of archiving such volumes of e-mail data.

Archiving e-mails effectively
"Small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) today are reluctant to place e-mail restrictions on their staff," says P.K. Gupta, Legato Software's director of Strategic Development for Asia-Pacific excluding Japan and Korea. "Therefore, they need larger storage environments to archive the e-mails and often as a result, affect the performance of their e-mail servers."

Tom Zack, vice president, marketing, sales and technical operation, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems concurs, saying the concept of placing strict limitations on e-mail within an organization is counter-productive.

"E-mail storage has become a big challenge for SMBs and large enterprises because the size and volume of e-mail messages is growing faster than the software to run e-mail systems was designed to handle," he says.

According to Gupta, companies should first set up policies to maintain years of e-mails without increasing their online storage. This can be done by moving copies of all messages and attachments automatically over to the archive in real time. On this cheaper storage, administrators can perform full text index searches when required.

Legato's E-mailXtender (EX) can help companies determine precisely the methods of managing the growth and retention of valuable e-mail data and legally critical information assets, claims Gupta.

"E-mail archiving solutions consider individual user mailboxes and migrate individual messages and attachments to secondary (archival) storage based on criteria such as frequency of access, age of messages, and time of last access," says Gupta.

HDS' Zack adds that a more productive method to dealing with e-mail archiving is to adopt a proper solution that ensures messages stored on the server are kept to a minimum.

He says that HDS' solution does this by detecting duplicate attachments and storing only a single copy of the document. It also allows migration of older and less valuable e-mail to less expensive second and third tier storage.

In short, e-mail archiving should be viewed as a process where a permanent copy is saved in a secondary location, rather than merely putting it on a PC's hard disk.

In short, e-mail archiving should be viewed as a process where a permanent copy is saved in a secondary location, rather than merely putting it on a PC's hard disk. This is an expensive endeavor but is the most logical way of storing e-mail for five years or more.

Therefore, says Zack, it is imperative for companies to get a robust storage infrastructure in place to avoid having to manually move the data from one type of storage to another.

Keeping track of old mail
In addition, it is crucial that employees are properly trained to use e-mail retention software. This is because there will come a time when a company needs to access and deliver e-mail messages in the course of an audit, investigation, or other legal and formal proceedings.

However, companies must not retain every mail on central servers forever, as over-utilized storage capacity may render them vulnerable to unplanned downtime.

Another important part of an effective electronic record management scheme, says Gupta, is the ability to conduct routine purging of e-mail messages that are not business records.

The proliferation of viruses today is another reason to migrate archived e-mail records to an alternate storage environment for long-term retention and management.

In a nutshell, companies must treat e-mail record management as a strategic component of business success, and not simply a tactical cost-driven activity. It is a long term discipline that must gain greater visibility and traction in a corporation.

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