E-mail Growing Pains
Company IT departments aren't planning ahead to have sufficient network bandwidth and storage capacity to handle their growing e-mail traffic, according to a new study from Ferris Research.
According to the study, in only 12 months companies can expect their messaging bandwidth requirements to be three to five times that of today. As the number of daily messages grows, and those messages increase in size, organizations may see a growth in storage overhead of 100% to 150%.
"One of the most surprising findings of the study was that despite the increase in message traffic and the increase in average message size, IT managers only forecast a growth of 50% in their message storage requirements over the next 12 months," says David Ferris, President of Ferris Research. "We believe they’re underestimating the impact of growth on their infrastructure." Ferris points out that these growing personal libraries of e-mail messages are gaining the interest of top management, who are concerned about the company’s exposure to costly legal discovery processes.