Third-party survey reveals increased need for email archiving solutions.

Email archiving is still in its infancy, according to independent survey results released by C2C, the supplier of enterprise email archiving software. While IDC forecasts email archiving applications to see an annual growth rate of 23.4 percent through 2011, only a small percentage of the companies polled have a solution in place, but the interest level is high. User time constraints, costs, search ability and recovery are among the most problematic factors in email management and are escalating interest and activity in this rapidly growing market.

The recently conducted third-party email archiving and management survey featured hundreds of respondents, including network administrators, system managers and other IT personnel from organizations of all sizes, who were asked questions pertaining to their company's email infrastructure and the methods they use to archive email data for long-time retention and to satisfy regulatory compliance requirements.

Among the survey's findings:

* Only 24 percent of respondents named an email archiving product or solution when asked to describe their current email archiving solution. Thirty-seven percent were under the impression that using PSTs is the same as email archiving, while 39 percent confuse backup and email archiving.

* The most important consideration of email system recovery and data re-acquisition is the time to restore email system availability (85 percent of respondents agreeing) with the ability to restore archived data to any convenient device with immediate access to the recovered data (78 percent of respondents agreeing to each).

* Fifty-seven percent of respondents want to do 'live' searches before archiving, with 13 percent saying they see no need for searching email content at all. The remaining 30 percent only want to search archived content. Most of the archiving solutions available today do not provide the ability to do live searching.

* The most important applications for email archiving solutions is to integrate with system management applications (84 percent) and security and storage management applications (82 percent each), demonstrating that today's customer wants their email archiving integrated with other parts of their corporate system.

* An amazing 51 percent of system administrators do not consider relying on PST files as a problem.

* Forty-seven percent of those surveyed said they never check the integrity of access to mailboxes for any level of employee, including C-level employees. This is a stunning figure given the amount of hacking and general system abuse and the fines handed out by SEC and other organizations for failure to keep data secure and available.

* Of respondents answering 'important,' 'very important,' or 'of greatest importance,' the most problematic issues facing organizations include increasing backup and restore times (59 percent); costs associated with messaging-related storage (53 percent); finding messages and message content (51 percent); and poor email server performance and use of .PST files (49 percent each). www.c2c.com