+48% in Cloud Storage of Emails Over Next 12-24 Months

Iron Mountain Incorporated recently teamed with IDG Research Services to conduct a survey on the current state of email management, and the strategies and tactics used by large companies to reduce the costs and risks associated with email’s growing complexity. The results represent responses from 115 executives serving in both IT and business capabilities at companies with 1,000 or more employees. A white paper and videocast discussing the survey’s findings are available online.

IDG Research Services surveyed IT and business executives on the state of email management within their companies – what they were doing, why they were doing it, and what challenges they faced. The results reveal a shift in the perception of email management – not only its implicit importance, but the explicit need for serving communication needs as well as compliance and regulatory requirements. Not surprisingly, they also reveal an increasing desire to make email management as cost-effective and efficient as possible.

Key findings from the survey include:

• 82% of respondents report that email downtime at their companies would have a critical or high impact on productivity;
• 71% indicate their IT organizations have been tasked with finding more cost-effective ways to manage email; 57% have been asked to do so within the next 12 months;
• The top five drivers for email management strategy are business continuity (which 74% of respondents rated critical or very important), disaster recovery (72%), compliance with federal, state and/or industry regulations (69%), eliminating email downtime (64%), and preparation for any future litigation / eDiscovery (62%).

The survey also explored attitudes about cloud-based email management solutions, such as those offered by Iron Mountain.

It found that cloud-based archiving could accommodate
the concerns of those in IT, Legal, and Finance:

• Respondents anticipate a 48% increase in storing email data online via a hosted/managed serviceover the next 12-24 months, along with a 30% decrease in offsite tape storage, today’s most common storage method;
• 61% of respondents expect to lower the burden on IT by outsourcing email storage and management;
• 62% percent of executives rate eDiscovery a top driver for email management strategies, since prudent risk management dictates the ability to find information quickly and accurately;
• 52% of respondents believe it is critical or very important to lower email storage costs, coinciding with Finance department goals of wanting to tackle email challenges as cost-effectively as possible.