10 reasons to archive e-mail.

According to Osterman Research, employees now use e-mail as a "21st century filing cabinet in which they document their activities, store tiles and important communications, and conduct business."

With this in mind, companies that back up but don't archive e-mail--enabling messages to be quickly searched, restored, and used--may be making a huge strategic mistake. In a recent position paper, "Archiving Email for Compliance and Competitive Advantage," Osterman gives 10 key reasons to archive e-mail:

1. Compliance and legal discovery-E-mail records are being used more to incriminate or protect organizations. A comprehensive archiving solution that facilitates data management and search can help companies be better prepared in the event of a discovery process.

2. Storage management--Hardware-based solutions provide centralized storage for all e-mail accounts, reducing backup time, hardware requirements, and media costs.

3. Risk management--Archiving all e-mails in a central location enables organizations to quickly produce a paper trail to help resolve disputes and prevent litigation. An archiving solution can also help to deter employees from using company e-mail inappropriately, while eliminating the need for users to store e-mail on personal media, risking the loss or theft of company data.

4. Knowledge management--Archlying ensures that corporate knowledge is retained and stored in an accessible format while protecting the integrity of the database by preventing users from altering or deleting files.

5. Employee productivity--Archiving e-mails in a central, searchable repository saves search time and enhances competitiveness by providing instant access to the company's knowledge base.

6. Business continuity--Automatically archiving employee e-mail ensures that organizations retain access to e-mails when employees leave or systems crash.

7. Improved network performance--Archiving e-mail on a dedicated device can eliminate the need to keep old mail on the server, thereby improving server performance.

8. Disaster recovery--A centralized, automatic e-mail archiving solution provides a consistent way to protect e-mail data, as well as a more cohesive method for restoring e-mails in the event of a security breach, outage, or disaster.

9. Reduce IT's workload--In a September 2007 study, Osterman Research found that in Exchange-enabled organizations of up to 2,500 e-mail users, IT spends more than 4 hours per user per year managing e-mail. A standalone, automatic e-mail archiving appliance helps reduce IT's time burden by reducing the wear and tear on network resources and allowing users to resolve some e-mail-related concerns on their own.

10. Organizational dexterity--integrating an e-mail archiving solution will create a standardized way for e-mail to be stored, change poor and/or inappropriate use habits, and eliminate the need for rogue databases and personal archives. All e-mail can be searched and accessed, allowing organizations to access information faster, have more complete information, and make better business decisions.

A recent IDC study revealed that a company with 1,000 information workers can expect to lose more than $5 million in annual salary costs because of time spent on unproductive e-mail searches. However, IDC predicts that global sales of e-mail archiving solutions will reach $1.4 billion by 2011; they increased by 45 percent in 2006 alone.