Email used to be the preserve of the tech savvy or scientifically oriented. Then it slowly became more accessible and evolved from the rudimentary text only technology into the rich media offering we have today.
Every business, and the vast majority of individuals use email to communicate. Hundreds of millions of mails are sent every day. While most of them will be spam of junk, the rest will be anything from corporate contracts to the latest celebrity gossip.
Email has become the quick, reliable communication medium we know today, partly thanks to Microsoft Exchange Server series of applications. While it certainly isn’t the only message server software around, or even the best, it is the most widely used. Mainly thanks to how it integrates with Windows servers.
As email became more popular, mailbox space started becoming an issue for business. There was a time when a one megabyte email inbox was plenty of space. Now the average users needs at least a couple of hundred. Even the free email providers like Gmail offers several gigabytes storage.
Users began swapping music, video and other space intensive files via email which put further demand on storage. Emails began expanding from a couple of kilobytes into several megabytes. Multiply that by several hundred users, and you have a considerable strain on a messaging infrastructure.
Many organizations limit the size of emails that can be sent within its infrastructure, but with our increasing dependency on email for communication, space is still an issue. With the latest versions of Exchange, inbox size can be limitless, defined only by the amount of disk space allocated to it. While hard disk drives are larger and cheaper than before, they are still an expense.
Then along comes E-discovery and compliance. As email was such an important piece of business, and so much dealing was done, governments and the legal system needed access to it in order to make or break cases.
Compliance law came into being a couple of years ago and stipulates that all corporate email should be retained and archived securely for a minimum of five years. This added considerably to the space requirements of any messaging system whether Exchange based or not. Users inboxes now had to be indexed, compressed and retained in a secure environment.
Some organizations decided to bear the expense and run their own secure storage facilities, while others went to vendors like Archive Compliance in order to have their email stored. Outsourcing seemed like the least of two evils, as it negated the investment needed in hardware and support infrastructures.
These kinds of software as a service operations saved the small to medium business a lot of time and money by offering archiving and compliance as a service. No up-front expenses like servers, licenses, software and engineers was needed as they would manage it all.
As we depend more and more on email, the demand for larger inboxes, and storage will increase. Fortunately some of the expense is offset by larger hard drives becoming cheaper all the time. Until email is superseded by another technology, it is something that business is just going to have to deal with.
