Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Managed Email

There is no doubt, for a huge number of businesses, the hosted model and managed email is the ideal solution. For a relatively small amount of money per month, a business can relinquish all responsibility for managing their own messaging infrastructure, compliance and all that it involves.

Whether you use a hosted solution or not, there is still a significant challenge in corporate email and that’s inbox sizes. With email being the number one method of communication, it’s all too easy to fill even the most generous mailboxes relatively quickly.

With a hosted model, that can cause problems, as the mailbox is generally set in stone until you negotiate larger ones or upgrade your contract. As email becomes more popular, mailbox space starts becoming an issue.

There was a time when a one megabyte email inbox was more than enough. Now the average user needs at least a couple of hundred at the very least. Even the free email providers offer several gigabytes storage nowadays.

Even in situations where email misuse is adequately controlled, many business documents can take up many megabytes. The average CAD drawing, financial spreadsheet or product brochure can be several megabytes on their own.

To add to this, our habit of using email as data storage is a big problem. While Microsoft sought to alleviate the burden from Exchange with SharePoint, and other software manufacturers brought out their own document servers, we still store stuff in email. Over time, this space demand grows until the mailbox is full and it won’t work until space has been freed.

While it can be argued that this is a habit that we must learn to break, it’s still something managed email users and providers have to deal with. The cost of managing data on a large scale is often one of the compelling reasons a business moves to the hosted model in the first place.

Many businesses limit the size of emails that can be sent within its infrastructure. However, with our increasing dependency on email for communication, space is still an issue. With Exchange 2010 there is no inbox size limit, the only constraint is the storage medium used. While hard disk drives are larger and cheaper than before, they are still an expense.

None of that takes into account e-discovery and compliance though. Compliance is an operational necessity, but not a real time one. It’s an unfortunate situation, but unavoidable. Every business has to comply with differing requirements depending on the type of industry you’re in.

Compliance law came into being a number of years ago but are continually revisited and updated as technology changes. They stipulate that all corporate email should be retained and archived securely for a set period of time. This adds considerably to managed email space requirements. All email inboxes have to be indexed, compressed and retained securely.

That includes attachments, forwarded mails, mail chains and other size intensive emails. So not only does the managed email system have to cope with live mailboxes, it also has to be able to cope with archives.

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