Can those endless streams of e-mail be best handled in-house, or is there a better way?
It seems like a long time ago now, but Australian companies were once happy to let individual employees deal with the mail that entered their inboxes. That was before the barrage of spam and viruses to those inboxes reached unmanageable levels. Research group IDC says more than 18 billion person-to-person e-mails were sent daily in 2003 -- a figure the analysts predict will double by 2006.
"Most of us were raised to believe that information is power, but people are now drowning in information. The majority of people are now spending between 25 to 50 percent of their day in e-mail," says Tony Hughes, managing director of enterprise software vendor Hummingbird.
"Up to three quarters of a company's know-how, and for many organisations that is their intellectual property, is buried in their e-mail system.
"By the end of next year over nine trillion messages will be sent globally. This is a horrendous problem and it will be very difficult to deal with."
Due to the huge increase in e-mail volume being handled by companies, IT managers are having to spend more of their time dealing with the problems of spam, viruses, storage, and archiving. One potential solution to the problem is the outsourcing of e-mail services. Advocates of e-mail outsourcing claim that it can reduce the amount of time spent dealing with company e-mail -- allowing IT managers to get on with the running of their departments.
Such solutions offer up-to-the-minute virus protection, spam blacklisting, and archiving -- as well as the option to have the e-mail server stored off-site.
According to research group Gartner, 80 percent of those enterprises with fewer than 300 staff could save money by outsourcing e-mail.
