Only 14 percent of all corporate e-mail accounts are being backed up and archived for future access, claims a new report, leaving firms open to
potential prosecution under data protection regulations.

In E-Mail Archiving Market, 2007-2011, analyst firm Radicati Group estimates that a typical corporate account generates 18MB of mail and attachments per business day and that this will to rise to over 28MB (or 6.7GB per year) by 2011.

Under new corporate governance regulations, companies must be able to retain e-mail messages on specific subjects or individuals for a given time before deleting them and prove that they can retrieve stored messages quickly should the law require them to.

“Without an archiving record of all relevant messages, regulated companies can be heavily penalised,” said Radicati Group president and chief executive
Sara Radicati.

Gerald Sommariva, UK managing director of storage solution provider OnStor, said there was quite a lot of enterprise activity around email archiving a couple of years ago, but no longer.

“Either organisations have already deployed [archiving systems], or they chose not to deploy them for cost reasons. If they have not deployed them they may have to think quite quickly about what they have to do,’ he said.

High-profile litigation in the US, such as the ongoing antitrust case between Intel and AMD, shows the dangers of failing to store
email properly.

“These cases make people think, but even without that, anybody who has a business realises today that much of their business-critical information is being kept in emails, so they need an effective way to store and search it,” Sommariva said.

Up to two-thirds of email archiving solutions are supplied by service providers specialising in data retention. But Sommariva said enterprise IT managers can deploy them in-house using software available from the likes of Sym antec and Thinking Safe, backed up by low-cost disk arrays.

“Decide on the email policy first, then look at the technology to help with retention periods,” he said.