September 20, 2004
Why Outsourcing E-Mail Archiving Makes Sense
The enormous volumen of e-mail coupled with the complexity of compliance requirements makes outsourcing make sense.
At U.S.-based companies, each employee sends and receives 53 email messages per day on average. With message volume growing steadily at a rate of 29 percent annually and average message size growing at 10 percent annually, storage space is being consumed by messaging systems at an alarming rate. While the acquisition cost for disk space is cheaper than ever, the cost of managing that space is more costly than ever. Add to this increasing, overlapping email archiving regulations, a heightened focus on business continuity planning for messaging systems, and widespread recognition that email messages are business records that should be preserved just like other corporate records, and enterprises have a problem that they simply can't tackle on their own.
As a result, companies are finding that it makes sense to outsource message archiving and recovery. For years, enterprises have outsourced functions that typically have been affected by the heavy hand of government regulation. For example, benefits and payroll have been typically outsourced because navigating the waters of tax law and human resources is a headache that small and mid-sized companies would gladly wish on someone else.
The same holds true for message archiving. Local message management requires internal IT departments to put forth not only substantial time and expense during implementation, but also to budget for ongoing maintenance and administration. Scaling the solution is limited by budget constraints and storage capacity planning is challenging because of unpredictable message volume. With a locally managed archiving system, internal compliance and IT personnel bear the responsibility for maintaining the infrastructure and enforcing policies.
On the other hand, the benefits of outsourcing are significant. Demonstrating to a regulatory entity or court that there is no way to tamper with messages is a much easier proposition when the messages are stored offsite and managed by an independent third party. In a disaster, having messages offsite ensures that they can be recovered and provides employees with the ability to continue to communicate and conduct business. Most importantly, storing messages offsite, reduces the burden of storing and administering the enormous volume of critical business data.
For compliance officers, the decision to outsource message archiving will be based on the interplay of three primary criteria: control, performance and savings. While cost-saving has always been tied to outsourcing, managed email services challenge this paradigm by delivering the optimal balance of control, cost containment and performance. Managed services provide IT managers with the control they require while removing the administrative overhead of managing and scaling the system for their organization. Performance is guaranteed by service level agreements delivering in excess of 99.999 percent reliability and finally, with managed services, costs remain fixed and predictable over time.
Email archiving will follow the outsourcing model that has been popular in defeating spam. Managed service providers have been relied on to block viruses and spam before they enter the enterprise. Similarly, enterprises will come to rely on the expertise of managed service providers to ensure that their archiving and recovery infrastructure meets federally mandated requirements. While there's virtually no upside to tackling email retention in-house, there is significant upside to outsourcing the task. In an economic period of tight budgets and limited resources, companies need to focus their internal efforts on endeavors that have an opportunity to create competitive advantage. So, outsource the chore, pat yourself on the back for a great decision and concentrate your resources on more strategic tasks.
Kevin Merritt is vice president of archiving and compliance at FrontBridge Technologies, a leading provider of e-mail gateway services.
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