Offload e-mail attachments to the cloud

By Brian Curry, vice president, Product and Business Strategy at YouSendIt, Network World
November 10, 2010 03:42 PM ET

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

. What's this?

When e-mail arrived more than 40 years ago it ushered in a way to share small text-only messages. The emphasis was on creating a system with no single points of failure, where all users would have a unique address on a ubiquitous system.

To that end, the mission was accomplished. E-mail is not only ubiquitous as a text messaging system across the globe, it now functions as the backbone of most organizations' digital communication and file transport systems. Having changed relatively little since its inception however, this 20th century innovation is too often overloaded by the demands of our current digital era.

Sorting through e-mail archiving tools

E-mail is now the common denominator for all digital interaction, including data transfer, personal and professional communication, and even notifications from other applications. Unfortunately, the system is buckling under the weight of what we expect e-mail to deliver, as we continue to leverage it as the default courier for every piece of digital communication.

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According to Forrester Research, 87% of workers use e-mail as their main collaboration tool, which means a system originally intended for short messages is now being used as a repository for extensive messages that are accompanied by ever-growing file attachments. The result is longer wait times for e-mail messages to be sent and received and increasingly frustrated users who struggle to manage their way through an over-burdened system.

The average user sends and receives more than 40,000 e-mails per year, which takes up approximately 146 minutes per day, according to reports from Osterman Research. Because e-mail is seen as a social contract that we all communicate through and respond to, users feel guilty not clearing out the inbox at the end of the day, meaning more time spent organizing and managing e-mail messages and files. As a result, in many ways e-mail has become more of a barrier to productivity than an enabler of it.

As the prime conduit for exchanging information, the costs associated with e-mail continue to rise as inboxes expand. According to Osterman, between 20% and 25% of e-mails contain attachments, yet the attachments comprise 98% of e-mail traffic volume. Rather than port the attachments to the appropriate data storage centers, employees often use e-mail folders as a personal storage center. Much of a company's most sensitive information is sitting in an employee's inbox as a file attachment.

Consquently, e-mail is expensive to maintain, requiring continual investment in server hardware, security and storage as well as personnel to keep it up and running. Although storage costs continue to decline, according to Osterman, the cost of an IT department to deploy and manage a system can be five to eight times the cost of the actual storage solution.

The increasing volume of e-mail containing larger and larger attachments makes e-mail a compliance and management burden as well. Corporate networks go to great lengths to protect digital assets from getting out of the building. Companies commonly establish security policies that utilize username/password standards, encryption technologies and VPNs for remote access. However, with the click of a mouse users attach files containing that same safeguarded information and send it to an e-mail address outside of the company rendering all of these protections obsolete as the unencrypted file is copied to servers around the world as it makes its way to the intended recipient.