Today, most enterprises turn to Email Archiving and Management (EAM) to reduce costs and control information overload. With digital information, specifically email and messaging mushrooming faster than most enterprises can manage it, EAM projects have become a cost of doing business. EAM is fast becoming a business necessity.

The “Email Archiving and Management Report“,  published by CMS Watch, provides a clear strategy for your implementation team.

The domain of EAM is broad enough to touch multiple areas within your enterprise, including both technical and business departments. Managers have several common reasons to justify applying EAM technologies:

• To be proactive with legal requests and ediscovery requests
• To be in compliance with local governing requirements regarding information management
• To improve the performance of their e-mail environment (Exchange, Notes, or Groupwise)
• To reduce email volume on servers to reduce the need to buy more licenses
• To provide back up and disaster recovery for their e-mail system
• To improve storage management costs and needs

The marketplace keeps finding new reasons for applying EAM technologies. Compliance, for example, is a relatively new rationale. Traditionally, the sales and buying processes focused on systems management and storage requirements.

Most firms deploy EAM to address a single need, rather than meeting a range of needs to fully leverage the breadth of EAM offerings. In some cases, enterprises deploy EAM simply to provide a back up to an Exchange Environment; others use it to regulate and monitor the messaging of a particular subgroup within the organization.

While most enterprises deploy EAM related applications for a specific need or activity, all of these systems offer quite broad capabilities beyond their core focus elements. Some capabilities span across industries or  provide a more general purpose.

Many of these offerings have a lot in common as they respond to the market’s growing need to meet ever more complex requirements. In order to survive, most enterprises today depend on high volumes of email running efficiently through their system. Virtually all enterprises require that messaging be a part of the underlying IT infrastructure. Many decision makers describe systems such as Microsoft’s Exchange as the single most important communication and business application within their operation.  For these reasons email archiving and management solutions must be carefully implemented.  Email communication cannot be disrupted.