The global evolution of corporate communications and data storage has brought companies new opportunities and access to markets. However, the price of implementing and maintaining technology solutions has become prohibitive for many companies. Beyond capital Encrypted Email expenses, the operational costs often cut into the margins that technology makes available. For instance, the average user spends nearly an hour and a half every day managing emails and stored data.
To the individual user, it seems that email archiving is not a big issue. A single person may have a few hundred emails active and another few hundred archived. However, multiply those figures by every employee in a company and data storage and management quickly becomes a monumental task. IT managed services are now used to reduce the costs of corporate messaging systems through email archiving and the remote storage of data for expense reduction.
Reducing the operational costs associated with information technology while improving employee productivity through process simplification offers a strong impact on any company’s bottom line. Let us take a look at how and why these systems are successful cost saving measures.
Managing the Data Flow
It is often difficult to grasp the sheer volume of emails and other pieces of data that even small companies can generate over time. A large sized office within a corporation can easily generate between one and five million emails and storable data items every 90 to 120 days. Keep in mind that every recipient and carbon copy on an email creates another instance of the same message and again for each and every reply and reply to all.
Within a few years, storing all this data quickly becomes unwieldy and cost prohibitive. Having excessive data makes it difficult to find and utilize mission critical information while unnecessary messages generate higher storage costs. It quickly becomes evident that all of this data needs its own management, but that fact is easy to overlook or disregard beforehand. Using in-house IT resources and staff only adds to overhead while driving up the cost of technology. Only specialized technology firms can typically handle these operations on a large scale with the most cost-effective solutions.
Data Consolidation and Compression
The typical message environment consists of a plurality of data storage locations and media. Messages are typically copied and occupy multiple storage devices. As email quotas fill, users make local archival files or on-site physical backups. If neither data quotas nor email archiving is used, then exchange servers and mailboxes grow out of proportion, causing system slow down, long back-up times, and an increased potential for catastrophic failure.
IT managed services focus on implementing best practices for data storage, backup, and retrieval. Using a central server for data processes, email archiving becomes consolidated in one location. As messages are added to this central location, duplicates are erased and messages are consolidated and cross-referenced. Each storage media is deconstructed and then compressed into a uniform standard. User-created local backups, known as PST files, on-site physical backups, local files on computers, and network resources are all gathered into one file structure.
