Three Cs of Email Management: Consolidation, Compliance, Cost Control

Email Management just keeps getting harder

A well-known global financial services giant embarked on an ambitious strategy to consolidate their distributed email servers into central data-centers – a strategy top management was counting on to save millions of dollars each year. However, when the consolidation was finished, the expected savings failed to materialize. These savings were more than offset by higher bandwidth costs as messages between users located in the same building now had to travel across the costly wide area network (WAN) and back.

Closer investigation – achieved with the automated email measurement and analysis products from Permessa Corporation – revealed that only a handful of users among the company’s nearly twenty thousand email users were accounting for a vastly disproportionate amount of the email traffic. By identifying those few users, offering them alternative technologies to share information, and changing their email behavior by implementing and enforcing appropriate email policies, the company was able to lower WAN bandwidth utilization sufficiently to achieve substantial savings from their server consolidation.

Today, IT managers face tremendous pressure to reduce costs while simultaneously being asked to meet regulatory compliance mandates that often require the organization to closely monitor and control email activity and archive messages.

All this is happening while the volume of email messages and the average size of each email message continue to grow. These two factors significantly drive up the cost of providing email service. Cutting back email service to save money – of course – is out of the question. Corporate email is a business-critical application essential to internal and external staff, customer and supplier communications, and collaboration. As such, it is expected to deliver fast, reliable 24x7 service – just like heat and electricity. Just ask yourself: when email is down – for even a brief time – how long does it take before IT gets an angry call from the executive suite?

At many organizations, email is already out of control. In 2006, Osterman Research published a few alarming trends:

• Users are sending and receiving about 20% more email than just a year ago
• Mean storage requirements have grown 42% in the past year
• 17% of organizations have seen their message store growth exceed 50%

…and yet, Osterman’s findings show that only 15% of received email is deemed truly critical by its recipients! Now consolidation and compliance pressures combined with the explosive growth in email traffic are forcing IT organizations everywhere to take more aggressive and proactive measures to gain control over email messaging to reduce costs and ensure compliance.

Policy development and policy enforcement are two critical weapons in the battle to rein in email usage and provide effective email management. Policies are a critical component of a comprehensive management methodology for exercising email messaging control.

In this paper, we:

• Explain the role and value of email usage monitoring and control in providing effective email management
• Present a proven policy-based process for controlling email usage
• Describe how email management addresses Consolidation, Compliance, and Cost issues – the three Cs of email management
• Provide a set of best practices for email management

We conclude by introducing the Permessa Control! email measurement, analysis, and management products and services in the Appendices.