New compliance issues trigger email archiving boom
New compliance issues trigger email archiving boom
The spectre of heavy fines and possible imprisonment for business chiefs who fail to securely archive their company's electronic data is set to trigger a boom in the email archiving market.
According to a report by market researchers Radicati Group, thousands of businesses in the US are anxious to meet net government regulations on the storage of electronic documents, such as emails and instant messaging.
In their survey of 105 CEO's, 86 per cent said they felt email archiving was important, but 65 per cent also reported that they did not have an email archiving policy in place. "This indicates that we're about to see a major growth in sales. This is such a growth market," commented Sara Radicati, president and CEO of Radicati Group.
In Australia, while businesses do not (yet!) face the same stringent regulations and penalties as their US counterparts, Gartner's Asia Pacific storage research director Phil Sargeant said that what is happening in the US has had a definite impact on the market over here.
"There are different government regulations in different countries but there is no doubt that with respect to email, there is a lot of work being done on archiving and retrieval of email. It's growing hugely at a rate equal in relative terms in Australia as anywhere else in the world."
On the subject of regulations for email storage in Australia, Sargeant commented: "(Businesses are) not regulated to the same extent here as in North America but I wouldn't be surprised if that situation changed in the very near future."
Sargeant added that the repercussions of the new strict regulations imposed in the States, together with the desire among multinational companies to standardise their systems across the markets they operate in has had something of a domino effect in how they approach their electronic document archiving in Australia, generating business for Australian document archiving companies.
"Because multinationals want to have a pretty uniform and consistent (storage) mechanism right across their company, we have seen a certain amount of (US-based multinationals with Australian operations updating their systems here to the same level of compliance as in the US), but obviously it takes a lot of money and resources."
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