Keeping up with the needs of business—needs they don't even know they will have right now—is vital to those who will be host for and the storage center for that information
By Rod Belcher
If you ask most business professionals which they would rather give up—their right arm or their e-mail—the response, more often than not, would be "can I keep the watch?"
Electronic mail has become a vital means of communication across all the spectrums of our society, from high school students discussing assignments with teachers and peers, to replacing the old paper and pen correspondence sent home to families by soldiers at war. E-mail has also become the communications life-blood for many businesses.
"There is no question e-mail has become the primary communication tool for businesses," says Pat Matthews. Matthews is the CEO and co-founder of Webmail.us, an e-mail hosting company headquartered in Blacksburg with a recently opened Roanoke satellite office. Matthew's company provides small and geographically dispersed businesses with complete e-mail services, from on-line addresses for new employees to software and mail system security. Matthews explains that it is the ubiquitous nature of e-mail in the business world that has led to companies like his becoming so in demand as a way to keep costs low.
"The business community moved in a different direction with e-mail in the mid-1990s," he says. "While individuals were attracted to web-based e-mail products like MSN Hotmail and Yahoo, business were purchasing hardware and software themselves and at the end of the day they were having to work with a large number of third party services."
Now, Matthews says, businesses are looking toward web-based solutions for their internal e-mail. Companies, like Webmail provide all of the technical support and virtual architecture of a corporate e-mail system without a business having to shell out the money themselves for servers and expensive software, as well as IT personnel. It's a trend many professionals think is on the rise.
"I think you will see greater use of hosted solutions," says Elaine Carver, director of information technology for Roanoke County. "Once companies become convinced that their communication will be secure, access will have at least 99.999 reliability and the costs are competitive."
Another need in e-mail services that both Carver, a 25-year veteran of the Roanoke County Administration, and Matthews are seeing more of is a desire for wider ranging e-mail access.
"More and more employees are wanting to check their e-mail off the Internet," Matthews says. "They want to be able to access all their e-mail information, not just the last few messages they received. This is trend that has really been shifting. It used to be that all business people expected was to be able to grab the last few messages, but as the demand and use of e-mail has exploded, so has the desire to be able to access more and more archived stuff—old messages, notes and correspondence."
"We are becoming a more mobile society," Carver says. "Business is increasingly being conducted "on the road." This brings with it the need to retain more information, protect sensitive data, and connect seamlessly from anywhere.
That desire to hold on to, and send more data via e-mail, is also showing up in another trend that Matthews is experiencing first hand—the seemingly insatiable hunger for more data storage space.
"People are wanting to store more electronically now," he says. "Our company just increased the storage space we provide each account to five gigs. The infrastructure powering this business is huge."
A gigabyte, or "gig" is roughly a billion bytes worth of computer information—or about eight billion binary digits worth of data, roughly the informational equivalent of five pick-up trucks filled with books.
Matthews says as more e-mail users store larger amounts of information in their accounts, his company, and other hosting companies like it, anticipate information storage as becoming their bread and butter.
"We expect to eventually becoming a data storage company," he says. "We are saving terabytes and petabytes worth of data for customers, now."
Increasing data storage is a big incentive to customers, who always seem to find demand to full an increased supply of data space. But Matthews says it's expensive to improve data storage.
"It's not easy," he explains, "but it does provide an edge. Our goal is always to lower costs of data storage. You're looking at possibly storing more data on smaller devices, requiring fewer servers but for the most part it's a matter of working with the right vendors to find a competitive price. It's more a negotiation issue than a hardware or software issue."
With all this extra business information being stored in e-mail, Carver points out that there are a number of security issues with e-mail service for a company, including the human factor.
"SPAM, denial of service and nuisance e-mails and virus infections are all issues," she says. "There are network appliances, firewalls, SPAM filters, intrusion detection and software solutions that can help with this. I think the one thing that is over looked is employee security awareness training. Trained employees can help you avoid a lot of the problems we see today not only from e-mail but also from Internet downloads and re-attaching mobile devices to your network."
Matthews adds that his company is also seeing more businesses looking for the ability to have oversight capabilities for their e-mail services; to be able to review employee e-mails.
"It's growing fast," he says. "They don't so much want to read every e-mail an employee writes, but they are looking for auditing tools to be able to review e-mail communications at a later date."
"Corporations are finding it necessary to monitor how employees are using e-mail because costs of support are high," Carver says. "And e-mail represents another mechanism for others to gain access to protected and sensitive information."
Matthews says more productivity tools based off of e-mail applications are on the horizon of the industry as business clients seek more ways to do their jobs faster and smarter via the electronic office.
"We're seeing a lot of interest in sharing calendars, documents for review and other ways groups can collaborate through e-mail," he says. "We see our market segment trying to work more out of the in box."
(Rod Belcher is a Roanoke-based freelance writer.)