Email Archiving

IDC expects that the worldwide email archiving applications market will approach US$1.4 billion in 2011, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.4 percent.

Vivian Tero, senior research analyst for Compliance Infrastructure at IDC, said growth around the market has been driven by financial services customers looking to transition their old SEC/NASD compliant archiving solutions into more robust message archiving platform architectures.

“Customers are demanding integrated workflows that support legal discovery and audit requirements. In addition, the aggressive reduction in the cost of connectivity and storage, combined with rising awareness of the new legal regime, underpin the greenfield opportunities in the non-SEC compliant SMB and mid-market segments,” said Tero.

Laura DuBois, research director for storage software at IDC, said: “Email archiving is increasingly fuelled by both business and IT requirements for electronic discovery and regulatory compliance as well as performance, capacity, and storage optimisation. We expect over the next five years to see email and other content archiving solutions converge as firms continue to focus on managing information versus infrastructure.”

“There are two parts to email archiving,” explained Paul McClure, archiving specialist A/NZ at vendor CommVault. “The first covers compliance and auditing where you capture every message in an organisation and make it available for search. The second is around space management where you look at emails which have not been searched for a while and move them away from your primary storage.”

McClure said that the space management piece of email archiving is particularity strong across the Australian market as it creates the option to establish an infinite pit of data.

“Victoria has laws around document unavailability and that covers making companies have to keep data for x-amount of time. Federal laws are on the way and it is likely to be very similar to the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) rules in the U.S.”

The FRCP rules govern civil procedure in the U.S. and ensure that courts are no longer tolerant of organisations that have not implemented timely programs to accurately retrieve emails. The U.S. also has the well publicised Sarbanes-Oxley regulation which not only lays down legislations for the financial side of corporations, but also the IT departments who have to store corporations’ electronic records. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act states that all business records, including electronic records and electronic messages, must be saved for “not less than five years”.

Gerry Sillars, managing director of CommVault Oceania/ASEAN, said present legislations are targeted at specific industries, but this will change to affect every type of firm who will have to keep electronic documentation for a certain amount of time.

“In terms of how common email archiving is, 50 percent of our new business is driven by archiving requirements,” he said.

Sillars said one of the major advantages of email archiving is being able to manage Microsoft Exchange and other email systems. For example, if an employee leaves to join a rival organisation, efficient email archiving can stop employees from taking potential sensitive information with them into their new role.

“This is a very common problem,” said Sillars. “Email archiving is the only way to utilise the compliance part and lock down
the data. 80 percent of a company’s IP is in emails.”

CommVault has made the move of offering an integrated enterprise search engine with a familiar Google-like interface.

On the channel side, Sillars said it has taken time for resellers to get to grips with email archiving. “The channel is getting there. They are selling to different types of people with email archiving and most of our resellers are used to selling to IT people. But they are having to get used to selling to business people too.”

Sillars added that email archiving is an easy up-sell option for resellers who can return to their install base and engage on an email archiving level.

archiving data centre email servers & storage