* An attachment management system from Accellion for sending large files via e-mail
Editor’s Note: Starting Dec. 5, this newsletter will be renamed Unified Communications. The name change will reflect the newsletter’s broader focus as we report on the industry’s move toward a unified messaging model. We hope you will continue to enjoy the newsletter and thank you for reading.
E-mail systems are not only the primary communications medium employed in business today, they are also the primary file transport mechanism for most organizations. While FTP systems are purpose-built for sending files, they are not as easy to use as e-mail for sending files and not as universal.
The problem, however, is that e-mail was never designed to send extremely large files. When large files are sent via e-mail, bandwidth becomes constrained; message delivery times slow and servers can actually crash in some cases.
Accellion has developed an attachment management system that directly addresses this problem by offloading attachments from e-mail messages and sends and stores them via a parallel infrastructure. The result is that the load on e-mail systems is dramatically lightened and performance is improved.
I spoke with one of Accellion’s customers recently, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Like most hospitals and other healthcare providers, they have traditionally depended heavily on fax communications. However, their goal is to make their medical records 80% electronic by 2008.
The problem, however, is that while e-mail is the easiest way to send this information to the parties that need it, medical records can be enormously large – it is not uncommon, for example, for an MRI scan to be in excess of 500MB, not to mention the growing size of other data types sent through e-mail.
Most e-mail systems will simply choke on very large attachments, if they can send them at all. Add to this the need to be compliant with HIPAA and to keep the data secure and the problem grows dramatically. To address these problems, BIDMC implemented Accellion’s Courier Secure File Transfer Appliance to address its needs for sending very large files and to keep them secure.
The key takeaway is that e-mail is fantastically useful for communications of all types, but needs a boost for applications in which very large files are sent, a common situation in the healthcare, engineering and graphics design industries, among others. The problem will become more of an issue as we move toward unified messaging, since voice traffic traversing corporate networks will put even more of a strain on e-mail bandwidth and storage.
