Email rated as most important online account

Which online account do you think might be most important to web users? I would have guessed online bank accounts, but it turns out I was wrong. I’m in good company. Google researcher Elie Bursztein had also assumed that people were most precious about their online bank access but his recent survey proved him wrong.

Bursztein surveyed about 1100 people and found 45 per cent rated email as their most important online account. Bank accounts came in second at 28 per cent, followed by social network accounts and accounts with online stores and gaming. The 18-24 year old demographic was the only one to buck the trend, with just 31 per cent rating email as most important.

Bursztein discovered a couple of reasons why email is so important. Firstly, it is necessary for resetting passwords on other websites. Secondly, it is difficult to replace. If you lose access to your online bank account, there are still ATMs and branches and if you can’t use social networks anymore, you lose contact with some friends. But if email access is lost, you lose all your correspondence and personal and work contacts.

How SilverDane sees it… it was a surprise to see email ranking higher than online bank accounts in importance but when you think about it, it really isn’t a surprise. So much of our communication is done via email and to lose it would be to lose a history of communications and your access to many people.

Cheaper storage costs can’t keep up with data volumes

Storage costs might be getting cheaper but it isn’t happening fast enough to keep up with the rapid increase in data volumes.

Founder of the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Counsel (CGOC) Deidre Paknad writes that 90 per cent of the world’s data was created in just the last two years. CGOC has found that the majority of this data has no business or legal value to a company. Companies that are able to dispose of unnecessary data are able to reduce the costs of IT and legal and pass on the savings to shareholders. So how does a company weed out the valuable data from the junk?

According to Paknad, most storage cost-cutting programs are skirting the surface and don’t deal with the real cause of excess data because IT isn’t able to identify what data should be retained. Deleting data is risky business, with a billion possible combinations of legal and/or business value to any one enterprise employee and a single information source. The Information Governance Reference Model is helping IT negotiate the data minefield with its framework for determining and balancing data value with infrastructure availability. Paknad reports CGOC and similar organisations are collaborating with legal, compliance, records, business and IT departments from large global organisations to establish standards to help cut storage costs.

How SilverDane sees it…. reducing data storage in enterprises is a major undertaking and requires cooperation from multiple departments, each holding a piece to the puzzle that is determining what data is valuable and what can be safely deleted. It’s great to see collaboration efforts to cut the costs of storage.

Test the cloud computing waters with your email

Companies considering migrating to the cloud might like to start with their email.

Ian Hardenburgh from Tech Republic reports a major concern for companies weighing up the benefits of moving some or all of their operations to the cloud is the cost. Hardenburgh says it’s not as simple as just migrating over all at once; companies may not have the staff expertise to manage the changes and employees need to be educated on how to perform their tasks and access their data via the cloud.

He says email is a good place to start in cloud migration. The argument is a large percentage of a company’s IT budget is allocated to upgrading and maintaining email systems and cutting down wherever possible. Cutting the costs of managing email by just a small percentage could equate to substantial savings in an enterprise with thousands of users. Measuring the cost of using email in the cloud is also relatively easy because most cloud providers offer subscription or charge per user.

How SilverDane sees it… companies are increasingly embracing the cloud for convenience and cost savings. Why not start with your company email and if it works well for you and provides decent cost savings, then consider moving other aspects of your business to the cloud. SilverDane offers a cloud email archiving service for enterprises. Learn more about it at www.silverdane.com