subject: Email Looms as IT Threat
posted: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 14:05:55 +0100


[Can't dispute much of this, the problem for SMEs is the cost of any
kind of long-term solution. Is your average 20-computer company
going to sweat about "discovery" and pour thousands of pounds into an
archiving system, or are they going to worry about the next sale? -
Stu]

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=107231&WT.svl=news1_4

Email Looms as IT Threat


OCTOBER 11, 2006 | Email is growing by leaps and bounds, both in
importance and volume. So it's not good news that nobody's in the
wheelhouse.

Yet that's what turned up in a survey of 1,043 email users conducted
by a the Association for Information and Image Management, which
calls itself the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) association (an
example of what happens when you seek to modernize your name but
still own a longstanding brand and URL).

Results of the industry group's online survey taken in August and
September 2006 reveal that most organizations aren't managing email
at all. Aside from storing it for a given time period, most
respondents reported relying on end users to decide what to keep and
what to throw out. (See AIIM Posts Results.)

Further, what passes for email management could raise a regulator's
hackles. Forget automated policies tied to full text searches. (See
Stop That Email!.) For respondents in companies of all sizes, formal
policies govern things like acceptable employee use of email systems,
acceptable content of messages, mailbox size, and a company's
ownership of the email. When it comes to setting rules for using
email to transact business, discuss human resources issues, exchange
confidential information, respond to requests from regulators or
lawyers, the majority of respondents reported no policies in place.

Click here to view Table 1.

On top of having few rules about what goes into email, organizations
don't do much to protect it. Just 30 percent of respondents said they
had any email encryption policy in place, and 37 percent had a policy
for instant messaging -- this despite 61 percent of respondents
reporting concern about theft of confidential info or intellectual
property via email.

What emerges from all this is far from the landscape described by
email management vendors, in which organizations are eager to adopt
technology to sort and save important email.

When it comes to archiving email, nearly 60 percent of respondents
said they save email as part of regular backup. A full 18 percent
don't archive email at all. Just 3 percent reported outsourcing email
archiving. (See Outsourcing Email Not an Easy Choice.)

Click here to view Table 2.

Mancini stresses the risks of relying on backup or leaving email
management up to end users. "As anyone who has gone through an e-
discovery process can attest, finding and producing relevant emails
from back-up is not the same as producing them from an archive in
which the content is based on the subject and relevance of the
email."

On the plus side, respondents to the survey appear to be interested
in some form of archiving. Just 12 percent reported that they'd
continue to rely on IT's daily email server backups to manage email
in the future. A full 72 percent reported interest in an email
archiving solution integrated with either a records management
product, an enterprise content management platform, or some other
form of enterprise information platform.

For better or worse, the problems illustrated in this survey aren't
likely to diminish. According to the Radicati Group consultancy, the
volume of email that the average corporate user sends and/or receives
every day will grow 30 percent within the next four years, from 16.4
Mbytes in 2006 to 21.4 Mbytes per day in 2010. And unless companies
start taking action, Mancini implies, they'll be risking both their
ability to produce relevant proof for compliance or litigation, but
also their ability to benefit from increased use of email.

"Email has migrated from a proxy for conversation to a key form of
organizational documentation, but most organizations have yet to make
the jump to truly leverage email... Organizations largely leave the
management of email up to individual employees, a precarious position
at best given the critical role that email plays in documenting
business decisions."


- Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch
The Radicati Group Inc.

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http://cyberdelix.net/adminz/

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