April 2002  

Guess What? E-mail Isn't Free

By David Yavin, DYS Analytics

The world today takes e-mail for granted as instantaneous, ever available and free. This has resulted in rapidly growing volumes of e-mail communications, which are projected to reach 36 billion e-mail messages a day by 2005, according to IDC. Yet the simplicity of sending and receiving e-mail at the stroke of a key belies the cost of communicating electronically ' and the challenge most organizations face in monitoring and managing it all.

In the old days, when firms communicated primarily via 'snail' mail, they understood that the cost of a letter involved more than just the paper and the stamp. It involved the labor to type, copy and file it, and then to gather, sort and deliver it. Every year, industry associations update the average cost figures for sending a letter to emphasize that business correspondence is far from free.

It's time for the same level of recognition regarding the costs of e-mail in our electronic age. E-mail is NOT free. A messaging infrastructure that includes servers, bandwidth and storage is expensive. Routine and efficient e-mail use carries a cost for administration and handling. Simply put, the more e-mail traffic you have, the more robust an infrastructure you must build and the higher the costs to maintain it.

However, many organizations' e-mail infrastructures were built years ago. They may have been modified to accommodate today's heavier traffic volumes, but most are not equipped to measure, monitor and help the organization meet the surging demand for e-mail in the future ' and rising customer expectations for response times.

Racking Up Costs
Common business practices further tax the e-mail infrastructure. Well-intentioned but profligate e-mailing, misuse and abuse happen every day and come with a price tag that enterprises can no longer afford in today's cost-sensitive business climate.

Most employees would think twice about shipping a 100-pound package via overnight mail, mailing 7,000 hard copies of a newsletter each week or flying from Boston to New York via London to attend a seminar. Yet these same employees don't hesitate to send a 10 MB attachment to multiple colleagues for review, or they might think they are only keeping customers well informed, at no cost to the organization, by sending 7,000 copies of a 2 MB newsletter each week. They likely don't know if their e-mail correspondence from Boston to New York is routed through London.

These events happen daily and when totaled across an entire enterprise, have huge budget ramifications due to increased storage and bandwidth costs.

The High Cost Of E-mail
According to GartnerGroup, the total cost of ownership for 1 gigabyte of storage is $2,000 per year. A Global 1000 firm could easily consume 15 terabytes for messaging alone ' to the cost of $20 to $30 million per year. That figure excludes the rest of system costs for desktops, servers, networking hardware and software.

E-mail traffic appears so simple ' a series of 'hops' between routers or network devices from a single sender to multiple recipients. Yet the seemingly benign fact that one e-mail message can have multiple recipients creates layers upon layers of complexity in mail flow and, consequently, in how easily an organization can understand and ultimately control the impact of e-mail on the infrastructure. An e-mail message moves along various paths from its origin to its multiple destinations, consuming resources in the form of processing power on the servers that handle it, bandwidth on the network links it travels and finally, storage capacity at all of its final destinations.

Every time a second recipient is added to an e-mail message, the amount of storage consumed is doubled. Add a group and the storage impact of the message is multiplied by the number of people in the group.

Employees who even occasionally broadcast 2 MB newsletters to 250 recipients could be racking up $5,000 of hard costs to the organization in the form of storage space for a single message (assuming the 250 recipients keep the newsletter in their mail files). The benefits of these e-mails must be weighed against their concrete dollar costs.

Unfortunately, many enterprises don't even know how much mail they move in their environment, where it's coming from and where it's going. And the volume of e-mail in almost any organization is too large and too complex to be analyzed manually.

Traffic Helicopters That Alert, Divert
Market interest is increasing in a category of solutions for enterprise traffic management. More than just simple monitoring tools, these robust software solutions allow enterprises, particularly Global 1000 firms with thousands of e-mail users distributed across the world, to understand their total e-mail traffic. In turn, enterprise traffic management solutions provide a means to take control of the infrastructure resources consumed by e-mail.

Enterprise traffic management solutions provide visibility, planning and reporting capabilities on the utilization of resources on corporate networks. Like overhead traffic helicopters, they can spot the heavy traffic, identify bottlenecks and help administrators optimize the traffic flow along the network. They tap into various sources of information across the network (logs, directories, etc.) and then use sophisticated algorithms to correlate the data to map out end-to-end traffic patterns.

Traffic Reports For The Corporate Highway
These solutions tell enterprise network managers and administrators where the heavy loads are and how to balance them. Such solutions help reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for messaging systems while assuring maximum response time.

Enterprise traffic management solutions graphically illustrate:

• Unnecessary infrastructure consumption ('e-waste'),
• Inefficient topology designs (for mail, applications and replication if using a collaborative environment like Lotus Domino/Notes or Microsoft Exchange), and
• Opportunities for consolidation where cost benefits can be derived by combining traffic onto more powerful servers.

With these solutions, messaging and network administration staffs are able to:

• Track, compare and balance server loads, bandwidth utilization and storage consumption so they can predict when network resources are approaching their limits before bottlenecks occur and end users are affected.
• Identify major causes of wasteful infrastructure (e.g., storage and bandwidth) consumption, such as message size, mail broadcasts, distribution lists and 'binge' mailers.
• Highlight inefficient mail topologies, such as setting up mail servers to route all Boston-to-New York e-mail traffic via London over costly overseas lines.
• Develop messaging usage policies to reduce unnecessary traffic.
• Monitor compliance so appropriate action can be taken should misuse or abuse continue to impact infrastructure resources.

Take Control, Optimize TCO And Performance
Organizations change and grow. Messaging infrastructures need to grow, as well, in order to remain the vital central nervous system of the enterprise while operating at the lowest total cost of ownership. Yet organizations cannot manage what they don't understand.

Enterprise traffic management solutions provide an automatic visual scorecard on important dimensions of e-business traffic. They enable enterprises to understand traffic patterns and then refine the network to assure adequate performance and reliability while meeting budget constraints. They let organizations better predict when and where new servers and/or bandwidth are needed or if consolidating servers would achieve the same at lower cost. They identify immediate actions IT staffs can take to ensure speedy and efficient traffic flow across the enterprise.

Such solutions help major enterprises make the most of what they already own. They provide a faster return on investment from existing technology, optimize performance and lower the total cost of ownership.

That, beyond anything, is a message for today's times.

Dr. David Yavin is co-founder and chief strategy officer for DYS Analytics in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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