Email Still Essential To Business Owners: Survey Says

Everyone, it seems, is having a problem with email. In a recent GFI Software survey, 75 percent of business owners say the information stored in their archived email is worth more than $100,000. And 19 percent actually dub it "priceless." Yet, nearly half (45 percent) admit to not having an IT solution for managing or automating email storage and retrieval.

Half don't even know if their current method of storing email is cost-effective or actually admit it isn't. While cloud storage solutions are growing in popularity, two-thirds of those surveyed still use physical/manual storage solutions (storing emails on either servers or individual users’ machines).

This email hell we all live through is echoed in The Business Behavior & Email Management Project conducted by software company Oasys. The survey found that, on average, the majority of employees spend up to one hour a day looking for lost emails, 34 percent spend up to two hours a day, and 8 percent spend up to three hours daily. A miserable 2 percent admit they spend more than three hours a day seeking emails.

Why it matters to your business: Not having a good email storage solution in place wastes money, puts data at risk and wastes staff time. In addition to all that lost productivity, Oasys notes that employees’ mismanagement of email can lead to legal issues for companies: A whopping 87.9 percent of respondents admit to deleting crucial emails in their attempts to clean out their overflowing inboxes.

Comments

[DennisTheMenance]

05:46 AM on 12/13/2011

The Trouth comes out..
Ever since they created Mutual Funds, notice how LT Treasuries have ave. over 8% apy for the past 15 yrs!
And Americans Resources ( Commodities) in Energy have ave over 12% apy
Ave over 10% apy !

So tell me? Why has our Soc. Secuirty been Invested in both and not just Given to the Gov't Congress to spend and Make the Next Generations pay the bill for SS?

[DennisTheMenance]

05:41 AM on 12/13/2011

bIGGEST SECRET! All we have to do is
1. Double The SS Payroll contrabutions to Our SS
2. Thus Our SS Retirements will be Double in return..Instead of getting only $20k yr, you will get over $40k Yr
3. And we take this added SS Contrabution and Invest it Into AMERICA'S RESOURCES! It's Commodiities and it Companies..
4. and do the same ( double) Medicare contrabutions...

Just like Roosevelt wanted to do..

But guess who doesn't want this to Happen?

-Wall Street and The Insurance Companies..

[DennisTheMenance]

05:38 AM on 12/13/2011

i DON'T KNOW ABOUT MY "iN bOC" BEING WORTH MUCH, BUT I WOULD THINK SELENA GOMEZ, EVA LONGORIA AND KRIS KARDASIANS "IN BOXES" ARE..

;-0)

[EmailDoctor]

12:46 PM on 12/06/2011

Losing valuable data is only one part of the problem. Business users are also wasting up to 21days per person per year dealing very inefficiently with their inox according to our (Mesmo Consultany's) surveys and research. For example, though poor email etiquette which results in too many email chains, unrealistic reply time expectations and handling emails too many times.

However all is not lost and with some basic simple email best practice guidelines much of this time can be reclaimed and productivity improved. See www.mesmo.co.uk/news .aspx

[ChaseM1017]

09:25 AM on 12/06/2011

I would love to have $100,000 in my inbox as opposed to an advertisement for penis enlargement pills, but alas...

[GoodBoySunshine]

11:45 PM on 12/05/2011

Soon we will be seeing E-mail graveyards popping up all over the country...
-- like we do with those airplanes out in the desert.

[Bfry420]

10:57 PM on 12/05/2011

Dude I would bargain it and keep on working the email. heyyyyyyyyyyy. with thumbs up like the fonz

[Intelligentia]

10:23 PM on 12/05/2011

It could even worth millions when hackers get information about you invention or book/screenplay idea and steal it for profit. Encrypting the e-mails is not a guarantee to their security either.

[ufopp]

10:01 PM on 12/05/2011

Of course some of my emails are worth more than $100,000. A couple are certainly priceless.

[ChaseM1017]

09:27 AM on 12/06/2011

Of course

[MarkOates]

09:58 PM on 12/05/2011

I got an idea, how about the US Mail create a rock solid email service?

[Breth]

09:50 PM on 12/05/2011

Memory is dirt cheap and the loss of information is costly yet even today many corporate IT dipsticks insist on arbitrary email limits. Even when not arbitrary the limits encourage / require info loss. Simply amazing.

[neekehurley1]

07:41 PM on 12/05/2011

of course. righto

[Realist2011]

07:30 PM on 12/05/2011

Remember, even the White House has (allegedly) had trouble keeping emails from being lost.

For businesses, email storage is only a subset of their overall "assets" storage problem. How many have clear disaster plans for their business information? How many have clearly delineated the data that is "priceless" vs junk? Whether a small business or a large business, the information on your computers isn't easily rebuilt.

We used to tell users to backup their data frequently because for every hour they were on that computer, the loss of data would take at least that long to rebuild, assuming it was possible. Now, backups have long moved away from individual computers to the computing centers, the cloud, whatever, but still there are vulnerabilities. You need to take the worst case scenario, and once you've solved how to come back from that, try to come up with a solution for a scenario where "worst case" wasn't as bad as what you're actually dealing with.

Fukushima is a good example. They calculated that the worst possible earthquake would be less than 8.0. Not only were they wrong, but they had essentially built the facility under the assumption that they would have been "right" in their assumptions, forever. Folks, forever is a long time. Start planning your data protection based upon the very worst you can come up with, then get creative and solve even worse problems hitting you. Losing your data today could mean being out of business tomorrow.