Research results released in November 2011 show that many companies are failing to maximize the efficiency with which they extract useful business intelligence from archived e-mail. While a majority of businesses value this information – including for analysis of communication trends and response times to customer queries, storage capacity monitoring and data leakage protection – many are using only the most basic tools to archive their e-mail.
The independent blind survey of 200 IT decision makers in U.S. organizations was conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of GFI Software. It reveals how organizations retain and reuse e-mail data, what solutions they have in place for doing this, what value they place on e-mail data and how frequently the IT department is called upon to assist in the recovery of e-mail from archives to support employees.
Key highlights from the survey include:
• Sixty-nine percent of respondents indicate that employee requests for assistance retrieving deleted e-mails limit IT staff productivity.
• On average, respondents say they receive more than 15 requests per week from users who need access to old or archived e-mail, while one in four (26 percent) of those surveyed field 18 requests or more per week.
• Forty-five percent of those surveyed have no IT solution for managing and automating e-mail archive retention and retrieval.
• Nineteen percent say the information contained within their archived e-mail is “priceless” to the organization, while three-quarters (75 percent) value their organization’s archived e-mail data at more than $100,000.
• Twenty-four percent of respondents do not believe they are storing their e-mail in the most cost-effective way, and one-quarter (25 percent) do not know if their current process is cost effective.
“This research shows how e-mail retention forms part of the overall business intelligence strategy and how, with the right tools, an existing asset like e-mail data can deliver long-term value to organizations of all sizes,” says Brian Azzopardi, MailArchiver product manager at GFI Software.
Learn more about e-mail management solutions at www.gfi.com.
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