Storage Toolkit

Data jail lacks key

Mark Hollands, Technology & Business Magazine Australia ZDNet Australia

Published: 24 May 2004 11:30 BST

Are you sitting in data jail -- trapped in a world of email demands from an impatient head office or needless missives from staff intent on bombarding you with information so that they can convince themselves they have covered their backs?

Data jail is an increasingly unpopular yet populous destination for executives whose inboxes are inundated with the valuable and the worthless -- with no way of telling which is which.

Executives receive an average of 7 megabytes of email data every day, fuelling the demand for corporate storage systems to the point where they now double every year, according to US-based Osterman Research.

For those suffering data overload, the bad news is the situation will not improve. Leading analyst firm IDC predicts that daily email numbers will increase from 2.6tn to 9.2tn within two years.

"We have just seen the first wave," says Peter Williams, chief executive of Australia's largest Web development company, The Eclipse Group. "The arrival of ubiquitous high-speed wireless broadband networks and 3G phones will make today's email volumes appear small indeed."

At least a third of email is occupational spam, according to Tony Hughes, local boss of specialist email software vendor, Hummingbird. Garbage in the inbox, like e-Christmas cards and notes announcing a lady in reception selling books, is weighing down networks.

John Duckett, general manager for IT at law firm Phillips Fox, confirms Hughes's assertion, saying that of 13,000 emails received externally each day, an average of 3500 are caught in his anti-spam net.