Archiving is one of those strategically important initiatives that has implications for the entire organization. Mention archiving and the first thing that most organizations would respond with is, ‘Yes, of course, we’re archiving’. And the content most often archived? Email, of course.
Trend 1: Explosion in email volumes
It’s little wonder when we faced with the statistics from Radicati’s Email Statistics Report:
- Email expected to increase from 3.3 billion accounts in 2012 to over 4.3 billion accounts by year-end 2016.
- Growth in volume of business emails sent and received per day to grow at an average of 13% to reach over 143 billion by year-end 2016.
I’m sure you already know (and are probably already experiencing) the challenges that this explosion in email volumes is doing to your archive (storage bloat, slow ingestion rates and ineffective search and retrieval among others).
Trend 2: Increased regulatory scrutiny
And for regulated firms, this challenge is compounded by the fact that industry regulators have demonstrated an increased focus on retaining business correspondence. Over the last three years, no fewer than ten regulations relating to the archiving of electronic communications have been issued or updated by regulators around the world. In highly regulated industries such as Financial Services and Healthcare, we’ve seen recent cases that have highlighted some of the struggles with email archiving process.
Trend 3: Increasing use of real-time communication and collaboration tools in organizations
And then, there’s also the fact that the number of electronic communications used within an enterprise over the course of the last decade has multiplied. Sure, email is still the main mode of communication, but it is now being used alongside:
- Collaboration platforms, e.g. Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce Chatter and Jive
- Unified communication platforms e.g. Microsoft Lync and Cisco Jabber
- Public instant messaging networks e.g. Yahoo! Messenger, AIM
- Public social networks e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
- Specialist community networks e.g. Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters Eikon, ICE Chat
These electronic communications are different in nature to email. They are sent in real-time, and participants have the opportunity not only to reply instantaneously but also to copy, edit, and even delete in an instant with just a few keystrokes.Tracing the authors of electronic communications could also be challenging if the communications were sent via personal accounts, such as in the case of social media. Firms could have a difficult time tying the account names on social media (for e.g. @lonewolf1) back to a corporate identity (for e.g. John Smith).
These 3 trends are the reasons why regulated firms need to re-assess whether existing archiving processes and technologies are capable of meeting these new challenges.
Want to learn more? Download two papers: Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving and Record Retention is Back in the Spotlight.
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