We recently conducted a study asking CIOs, e-mail system admins and others about the importance of various initiatives over the next 12 months.
We recently conducted a study asking CIOs, e-mail system admins and others about the importance of various initiatives over the next 12 months.
Of the 10 initiatives about which we asked these individuals, improving antispyware capabilities was determined to be the most important area for investment in 2008 – 69% of respondents told us that improving their antispyware systems was important or extremely important, while only 6% indicated that this was not an important initiative.
Almost as important were improving disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities – 68% viewed improving these capabilities as important or extremely important, while only 11% felt that this was not an important area for their organizations next year.
An interesting finding from the study focused on e-mail archiving: while 56% of respondents told us that deploying or improving their e-mail archiving capabilities for e-discovery purposes was important or extremely important, 67% told us that archiving for storage management was important.
This last point indicates the direction that e-mail archiving is going. While archiving has traditionally been deployed for regulatory compliance and more recently for e-discovery applications, many organizations are now viewing archiving as a useful tool for managing e-mail storage growth, the leading messaging-related problem cited by decision makers in numerous Osterman Research surveys.
Because an e-mail archiving system can help IT departments manage storage growth more efficiently, and because these systems can help users free up time from managing their own mailboxes to stay under mailbox quota limits, archiving systems are increasingly viewed as a key part of a storage management solution.