Valuable data at risk from attempts to reduce email clutter

4.30pm - by ADAM GIFFORD

New Zealand businesses could be throwing away critical business information by imposing arbitrary limits on email mailboxes.

A survey conducted last month by computer storage vendor StorageTek found seven out of 10 medium and large New Zealand organisations limit mailbox size.

This forces staff to delete emails or move them to their PCs.

StorageTek Australia and New Zealand managing director Philip Belcher said organisations don't realise how much business-critical data are now stored in emails, including customer transactions, contracts, intellectual property and company know-how.

He said their storage systems have not kept up with the challenges of managing and protecting that data, nor can they cope with its growth. More than 90 per cent of those surveyed said email storage requirements grew at least 25 per cent a year and almost a quarter expected it to double each year.

Recent decisions in the United States relating to email in the Microsoft anti-trust case, the Enron collapse and other corporate malfeasance have made many organisations more aware of the need to have mechanisms to either store and retrieve email, or to ensure it is properly purged from the system in line with appropriate policies.

Work being done here by the Law Commission on electronic transactions indicates many documents which are starting to exist only in electronic form will be covered by laws requiring retention of particular types of documents, such as tax and company records.

The StorageTek survey involved storage management staff from 27 medium and large organisations who signed up for a StorageTek seminar.

While the number was relatively small, the results were consistent with larger surveys in Australia and the United States.

The survey found about 5 per cent of staff just deleted messages and hoped they wouldn't need them again.

A quarter move all their messages from the server onto their own PC, an eighth deleted their oldest messages and the remainder, 57.5 per cent, claim to carefully choose which messages to delete or move.

Belcher said mailbox limits are an inefficient way of dealing with the email mountain.

"Half the self administration forced on users either directly contributes to loss of email data or moves data beyond the reach of centralised backup," Belcher said.

"The other half involves a waste of time and productivity with users having to sift through mailboxes to choose individual emails to delete or move.

"While most organisations back up email servers, 69 per cent of storage management staff said they could not restore emails from a backup themselves, 16.7 per cent didn't know whether they could or not, and only 14.3 per cent said they could restore email messages themselves.

Storage administrators said they were looking for ways to back up and restore emails faster and to reduce administration time.

They also wanted better tools to search the text of email and attachments.

StorageTek

Law Commission