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Your Business Information Assets
Information is undoubtedly one of the
most important assets of your business. Its existence is critical
for making viable and timely strategic decisions, fostering product
development, driving marketing, empowering world-class customer
service, and generating revenue. The information and intellectual
property your company spends considerable time and money creating,
and collecting, is contained in your business content. Business
content is a strategic, operational asset that must be aggressively
scrutinized, managed, leveraged and protected. Email correspondence
and attachments are one of your business information assets.
Every
day, organizations exchange and process ever-increasing amounts of
information via email. Today, AOL delivers more mail than the US
Postal Service. Thousands of business-critical email messages, many
with space-consuming attachments, flow in and out of an organization for action. As a result,
email
and application databases quickly expand beyond what most businesses
could ever have imagined.
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“An increasing number of business users are
relying on email more than the telephone for corporate
communications, generating an ever-increasing amount of
critical information through organizations’ email systems.
Email archiving is either very or somewhat important to 86%
of companies; however, today, only 37% have a formal email
archiving policy in place.
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While storage is, and will continue to be, a
primary driver for this market, regulatory and legal
compliance requirements such as those set forth by the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act, SEC and HIPAA are becoming vital as
well”
Your
business generates huge volumes of email information that can fuel
productivity and enrich your relationships with customers, partners
and employees. But if your organization is like most, 85 percent of
this information does not fall into the structured formats of
automated and indexed file systems or databases. Email streams
in and out of your business 24 hours a day from various desktops. As you strive to
make your operations more cost-effective and efficient,
Email Content Management can help you address a critical challenge
— managing and integrating email information across diverse
platforms, solutions and business processes — and making it
available to
end users when, where and how they need it.
Email Communications
Expose Your
Business In Ways You May Not Realize
While email is
streaming in and out of your business, there is also the alphabet
soup of
compliance requirements laws, corporate policy rules and
potential litigation exposure your email communications can be
susceptible to every day. The net result? Today’s rules of managing
and protecting your email and attachments have changed, and in a big
way. The stakes are high. How well your company intelligently
manages email content will make or break your
business.
Compounding the problem, the recent passage
into law of the Electronic Signatures in Global and National
Commerce Act authorizes the legitimacy of electronic signatures
in online contracts. This means that more and more people will be
performing transactions such as mortgage loan applications,
insurance contracts, and prescription drug fulfillment, using
electronic signatures. The digital signature alone is often a larger
file than the document to which it is attached.
In addition, under the rules of the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission (Ruling 17a-3 and 17a-4), brokers
and dealers are required to retain copies of all customer e-mail on
non-changeable media for a minimum of three years. Some types of
correspondence have a seven-year retention period; medical records
are stored for 20 years; still others must be maintained
indefinitely.
As a result, businesses across industries will
need to maintain electronic document trails that may rival
paper-based processes, all the while adhering to strict auditing and
legal mandates that dictate the long-term retention of documents.
Yet, conflicting company policies often require the deletion of
burgeoning in-box files and attachments after a specified length of
time.
Learn more about regulatory compliance.
Got
Storage? How Much Is It Costing Your Business?
Recent
research from the Radicati Group has shown that a typical corporate
email account sends and receives about 7 MB of data per day. With a
company of 1000 users, that’s an average of 140 GB per month.
Corporate email servers are simply not designed to stores such
massive amounts of data for long periods of time. By 2007, it is
expected to rise to 14.7 MB per user, per day.
Typically, the cost of data storage, including operative and
administrative labor, space, heating, capital, and depreciation is
about 20 to 50 times more than just the cost of the hard disk. Email
Content Management allows you to store and archive millions of
indexed email documents on inexpensive media, such as disk jukeboxes
and tape libraries, which replaces costly hard disk and still makes
them available to all who may need them for customer service or
litigation/discovery issues.
Disaster Recovery -
Are You Ready?
How do
you maintain backups of millions of pages on desktops that may be
vulnerable to fire, flood, a disgruntled employee or other catastrophe? Email
Content Management offers a central, secure storage and archive that may be
used to recover critical records, assuming that they are archived,
and that the server is located off site and is not affected by the
disaster.
The
Conclusion
There
are many issues surrounding corporate email and its management.
Backups aren't enough. Email content needs to taken off the desktop,
centralized, managed, scrutinized for compliance, indexed and easily
accessible by all who need it.
The net result?
Today’s rules of managing and protecting your email content have changed in a big
way. The stakes are high. How well your company intelligently
manages email content will make or break your
business. PriceCompete delivers in-house and hosted solutions for
email content management, compliance and archiving.
You've got questions, we've got answers.
Contact PriceCompete today for
Email Content Management relief with a FREE
Executive Assessment.
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