Trends and Questions – Where is the Email Archiving Industry going in 2013?
Certainly the trend to collect and preserve more diverse information types will increase significantly in 2013 as more social media, web content, mobile device content and structured data become a part of eDiscovery. What changes will be required to capture these information types and make them easily retrievable? Can this be done using more of the same or will it require new platforms, software and strategy?
Email archiving is presently done for compliance, eDiscovery, Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and data storage management. Questions arise concerning what else this information will be used for. Will more and more of it be used for intellectual property protection, for example? That seems likely, given the dramatic increase in Intellectual Property (IP) litigation and the increasing size of the judgments. According to a study by Navigant Consulting, the average size of the judgment in patent cases has increased from $6.2 million in the 1980s to $17.8 million in 2008
What about knowledge management, how large of a role will archiving play in that arena? Large information systems now maintain the organizational history, experience and expertise that long term employees used to hold. How will the knowledge in those systems become more easily and quickly accessed by employees? What new opportunities will this field present and what new capabilities will the archiving industry need to develop to realize those opportunities?
Then there are the more obvious questions to be dealt with as well. For example, who owns your archives when you use the Cloud? The last time I looked, Google’s contract said they do if you use their services. Nevertheless, as one of their customers told me recently, “I’m not going to worry about that. If Google starts selling our archived emails, they will have bigger problems than me.” He’s right about that but it still leaves the issue unresolved, who owns that information? Can you risk even a single breach in your email? If you’re like most companies, the answer is no. And if you can’t risk that, the Cloud may not be for you.
Intradyn products are built with direct input from our users. Every feature is designed to meet the needs of real work challenges. For more information on how Intradyn’s archiving solutions can help your business manage its archive needs contact sales@intradyn.com.
