News
Email tools lacking despite compliance risks
- By Matthew Schwartz, Enterprise Systems
- February 8, 2006
Managing corporate email servers isn't easy, owing to immature tools and the nature of stored email. An Osterman Research survey of email management practices at 116 companies--averaging 9,400 mailboxes each--found that many orgs still face legal and compliance risks, as IT managers battle a variety of management problems.
When administering Microsoft Exchange email environments, for example, IT managers say their top challenges are ensuring disaster recovery, followed by managing the volume of email, safeguarding and searching Exchange (.PST) files for legal-discovery requests, restoring email and email boxes for users, and automatically capturing email for compliance.
"The overwhelming majority of respondents indicated that they would welcome the addition of new self-service tools to empower users to manage their own needs for message recovery and search and discovery," says Osterman Research founder Michael Osterman.
IT managers report current email-management tools just aren't good enough. They don't want separate archiving tools for different types of information. "Those with existing tools in place highlight the need for improvements in search interfaces, speed of response to respond to discovery requests, and performance and scalability as among the biggest issues they face," Osterman says.