PORTLAND -- The recently-published Osterman Research white paper “A Guide to Messaging Archiving” indicates that support for regulatory and legal compliance obligations and growing storage requirements are among the reasons for companies to deploy a messaging-archiving solution, and that any one of those rationale can often justify the entire cost of the archiving capability.

The report was co-sponsored by Smarsh, a leading managed-service provider of innovative, high-performance and reliable e-mail-archiving and messaging-compliance solutions.

“Having a messaging-archiving system in place is becoming increasingly critical in today’s business environment,” said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. “We’re seeing an increasing number of examples of companies paying a massive price for a failure to produce electronic documents and e-mails. With an archiving system in place, such as the solutions provided by Smarsh, corporate risk can be reduced dramatically.”

According to the Osterman study, reasons to implement a messaging-archiving solution include:

Regulatory compliance. Industries that are heavily regulated, such as financial services or healthcare companies, must meet a variety of statutory requirements with regard to records retention.

Legal compliance. Dec. 2006 revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) require organizations to manage their data in such a way that it can be produced in a timely and complete manner when necessary, such as during legal discovery proceedings.

Reducing the impact of storage. Roughly 60% of decision-makers cite growth in messaging storage as a serious or very serious problem. Messaging storage, driven by increasing use of e-mail, larger attachments and the like, is growing at an average of 35% annually. By migrating data from storage on messaging servers to archival storage, companies’ overall storage costs can be reduced, while improving their messaging server performance and expediting recovery from downtime incidents.

“Historically, companies would typically only archive their electronic messages if required by industry or government regulation,” said Stephen Marsh, CEO of Smarsh. “Whether because of the FRCP revisions, increased regulation in individual industries, or simply the skyrocketing value of e-mail as a business tool, our client base continues to grow substantially with companies looking to implement e-mail and messaging-archiving systems. At Smarsh, we’ve been able to meet this demand by leveraging our comprehensive experience working with the financial industry – featuring perhaps the toughest, most-stringent and evolving regulatory environment – to help customers in other fields meet their electronic storage, surveillance and retrieval challenges.”

“A Guide to Messaging Archiving” also documents important factors to consider when selecting an archiving system, including:

High availability. Archiving systems must capture all e-mail data and loss of e-mail during downtime incidents can create serious issues.

Scalability. Systems must be able to store enormous amounts of data spanning large periods of time. The archiving system must be able to index, search and retrieve this information quickly.

Ease of use. Often non-IT groups will need access to the archive, making the minimization of training an important requirement.

“Companies looking for a messaging archiving system should not have to shape their policies and procedures around whichever solution they choose, rather the solution should be able to adapt to the company’s policies and procedures,” added Marsh. “Ultimately, an organization needs to have 100% trust in the infallibility of its archiving system, 100% trust that the system leaves no compliance loopholes and 100% trust that its individuals can manage the archive easily and quickly. All of these goals should also be achieved cost-effectively.”

For your complementary copy of Osterman Research’s “A Guide to Messaging Archiving,” visit www.smarsh.com.

About Smarsh
Smarsh is a leading managed service provider of innovative, high-performance and reliable e-mail-archiving and messaging-compliance solutions. Nearly 3,000 financial firms, including investment advisors, broker dealers, banks and hedge funds rely on Smarsh to be their industry-recognized Third Party Download Provider for mission-critical communication tools, satisfying rules SEC 17a-4 and 204-2 and FINRA 3010 and 3110. For more information on Smarsh, call 1.866.SMARSH1 or visit www.smarsh.com.

About Osterman Research
Osterman Research was founded by Michael Osterman in 2001. Since that time, the company has become one of the leading analyst firms in the messaging and collaboration space, providing research, analysis, white papers and other services. The core of Osterman Research's capabilities is its market research panel of IT professionals and end users that are regularly surveyed on a variety of topics related to e-mail, instant messaging, spam, collaboration, security, storage, archiving, data retention, compliance and other areas. For more information, contact Osterman Research at 1.253.630.5839 or visit www.ostermanresearch.com.