52 percent of companies have experienced an email failure in the past 12 months. This is according to Iron Mountain Digital. Of those companies, one third had outages of two hours or longer and 17 percent were without email for more than eleven hours. Even though email outages are still a common occurrence, one fifth of companies stated they have zero tolerance for an outage.

According to the research, 55 percent of companies are trying to reduce the volume of stored mail in Microsoft Exchange to reduce downtime. One of the most important reasons that companies try to implement storage management solutions, is to improve the reliability of Exchange. With the rapid increase in storage growth, Exchange is being pushed to the limit – impacting reliability and causing the backup, maintenance and recovery windows to grow.

Iron Mountain Digital urgently recommends that IT managers review inbox sizes or risk an email meltdown due to the impact of the ever-increasing amount of information on their servers. The IT department has to look for solutions that are designed to help administrators control essential email functions centrally. Disaster recovery functions, data reduction technologies and retention/deletion policies must also be major considerations enabling Chief Information Officers (CIO) and IT teams to create more manageable and effective email management policies.

“One of the most important reasons that companies implement storage management solutions is to improve email reliability. CIOs today are responsible for storing and maintaining millions, even billions of messages. Managing this critical data has become expensive and fraught with risk. Storage management and preventing email downtime are now critical tasks for any corporate IT department,” said Frederic Bouzy, head of Southern Europe, Iron Mountain Digital. “With the rapid increase in storage growth, email servers are being pushed to the limit. This is affecting reliability and causing the backup, maintenance and recovery windows to grow.”

“Unfortunately, the majority of companies are dealing with the issue either using email quotas, which are often unpopular with users, or are not doing anything to get a handle on storage management,” Bouzy continued. “Only five per cent of companies are implementing retention/deletion policies that encourage staff to manage capacity. Therefore, it is not surprising that nearly half of the companies surveyed found that implementing their version of email management is making their work more difficult. It’s clear that a much wider and forward looking approach is needed for email management.”