Storage

Yet this is hardly unusual for companies and their email. This leads to the ironic conclusion that--like not shredding paper documents--companies must retain their emails, even if they're keeping a smoking gun on their hands. Legalities aside, IT departments struggle with storing huge volumes of messaging data. Microsoft Exchange alone processes more than 3 million email messages every day, most of it through corporate email servers, and analysts estimate that email and attachments are growing at a rate of 35% per year. Since corporations are reluctant to delete messages, this type of volume greatly impacts storage purchases and management. This cost can sneak up on a business: Storage hardware is relatively cheap, so initial purchases account for only 20% of storage-related expenditures. But managing all these volumes is another story: Email administration tasks gobble up 43% of IT support costs. These days, companies are adopting and growing storage area networks to manage their email glut as much as their critical database storage.