That’s why this project to implement an e-mail storage management system is as close to a no-brainer as your I.T.initiatives get. The project combines a suite of data archiving, storage and recovery applications with a centralized,tiered storage architecture to provide the foundation for a dramatically more efficient—and easily scalable—e-mail management system.
Once requirements are finalized, the system can be rolled out in a matter of weeks using mostly in-house I.T. staff.Return on investment will come almost as quickly through short- and long-term hardware savings (redundant, often expensive hardware is replaced by low-cost storage arrays) and a steep reduction in I.T. staff time needed to managesystem administration tasks such as recovery requests and daily backups.
But the real payoff comes in the system’s promise of air-tight regulatory compliance and increased e-mail efficiencyfor your staff of 1,200. That’s also where this project’s major challenge looms. The system’s hierarchical archiving andcompression algorithms do most of the mail management users will need behind the scenes, but the compliance controlswill be worthless if employees continue to delete e-mails they should be saving or move files to personal folders.Plan for companywide training to clearly outline compliance requirements. And when in doubt, save everything. Afterall, with your company on pace to generate a terabyte of new e-mail data next quarter, what’s one more e-mail inthe archive?
To see the details behind this Planner and fill in your own estimates, click on the “Get the Tool” icon above and download the interactive worksheet.
