Email Archiving
Analyzing the Return on Investment

Almost every corporation in the world today has an email problem—high operational and financial costs associated with managing emails and instant messaging (IM). These problems are only expected to get worse as email increasingly becomes the de facto business communication tool. In fact, it is estimated that 131 billion emails are sent daily, with this figure predicted to increase to 276 billion by 2009.

To accommodate the increased usage of emails, many organizations are relying on the temporary storage repositories within email systems. Since these systems were not designed to store vast amounts of email and associated attachments for long durations, many organizations face numerous IT problems associated with an overloaded email system, including:

• System down time;
• Bloated inboxes;
• Mailbox size limits;
• Users moving data to local file stores (.PSTs); and
• Lost data due to .PST/.NSF corruption.

But the problems don't stop there. In addition to IT complications, organizations are experiencing unprecedented costs associated with managing their email archive. These higher costs are manifesting themselves in a variety of forms, including:

• Redundant data storage—Single emails (plus attachments) that have been sent to numerous people are being stored multiple times, driving up costly storage requirements.
• Rising mail server expenses—An increasing number of mail servers are being used today, with ever-increasing investment in the messaging infrastructure to increase capacity and maintain performance. 
• Excessive backup activity—Frequent backups with large data volumes increase risk of failed backups, longer backup windows and increased recovery times. 
• High administration costs—The number of full-time employees needed to manage an archive spans multiple functions.
• Lost end-user productivity—Statistics indicate that the average end user spends 25% of his or her workday managing their mailbox .

What is Email Archiving?
Email archiving solutions address many of the problems associated with escalating email. Most important, they deliver clear savings to organizations that deploy this software.

Here's how these solutions work: an email archiving solution will automatically apply corporate policies to offload messages from email servers based on any combination of parameters such as age, size, status, sender, location, etc. Through an archive process that is essentially transparent to the users, these messages are moved into a scalable, searchable archive that is highly optimized for the storage of email.

The key to the cost savings is the optimization of the storage, which includes benefits such as compression of messages and file attachments as well as singleinstance storage, which ensures that only one copy of each message and/or attachment is saved. The storage savings, backup savings, administrative efficiencies and user productivity are all fundamentally driven by these optimizations.

How is ROI Measured
Return on investment (ROI) is calculated by comparing the long-term savings delivered by the deployment of archiving software (project benefits) to the total costs of the software deployment (project costs). It is assumed that the deploying organization has historically incurred high costs associated with the management of its archival (costs today), and it will accrue quantifiable savings following software installation (total costs after project).

The example on the next page analyzes the ROI achieved in a 10,000-mailbox organization running in a Microsoft Exchange environment. The savings listed is an expected case scenario following the deployment of ZANTAZ Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS) in the enterprise.

Using the above assumptions, a 10,000- mailbox organization can expect to achieve a 1,318% ROI over a three-year period. This is calculated by comparing the cost savings from deploying EAS (project benefits) to the EAS implementation costs (project costs).

The example is based on the following assumptions/inputs:

Number of mailboxes—10,000 

Number of geographic locations where mail servers exists—2 

Total storage required before EAS— 3,900GB ? Total number of mail servers before EAS—41

Total number of daily/weekly/monthly backups before EAS—1/1/0

Total full-time equivalents (FTEs) required for administration before EAS—approx 3

Average minutes each week that end users spend managing their mailboxes—5

Spoliation costs accrued before EAS—none

Number of EAS licenses sold—10,000

No optional add-on EAS modules deployed

Total Cost Analysis
Total Expected Costs Over Three-year Period Without EAS-$9,959,169
Total Expected Costs Over Three-year Period With EAS-$3,815,327
Total Savings Over Three-year period $6,143,842

Return on Investment
Expected Startup Investment in EAS (Project Costs) $466,053
Expected Savings Over Three-year Period (Project Benefits) $6,143,842
Return on Investment 1318%
Three-year ROI analysis

Savings Analysis by Key Cost Driver
The above ROI results are primarily the result of cost savings achieved by automating and optimizing the email archive. Specifically, this organization was able to reduce costs related to storage, mail servers, backups and administration, and also increase end-user productivity. The expected savings over a three-year period are analyzed in detail below:

Storage costs. A typical corporate user sends and receives about 19.5MB of data per day. For a company with 10,000 users, this is an average of 195GB per day, or 3,900GB per month. Using a retention period of 30 days, the company will spend at least $199,680 to maintain that level of storage capacity at any given time. Further, it can expect to add at least $120,000 in new storage per year.