Enterprise Storage optimization

For any Enterprise, even in the age of social computing, Email still remains as the primary medium of information sharing. It is source of information on current state of Business, communications with partners, customers etc.  It is also leveraged for sharing non-business related information.

Depending on the no. of employees, their daily activities, business transactions, the no.  of emails that are generated by them, storage requirements will grow. That too, if those emails are carrying business critical, heavy weight documents, storage requirements will still grow. Other factors that will impact storage requirements include no. of persons with whom a document is shared and no. of subsequent versions of that document before its final version is getting frozen.

Even if the Enterprises have governance mechanisms, IT policies ensuring the restrictive, optimized usage of emails, some of the business critical factors still demands increase in the per employee email storage quota and hence impacts storage requirements. Imagine a scenario where an Enterprise has 10,000 employees. Assume every employee generates 1 email per day with 1 MB average size of document. Total size of the content generated will be 10 GB / day.

Adding to these, imagine every employee shares his email with on an average with 10 other no. of employees. This will result in generation of the document copies, sizing 100 GB approximately.

Now you can visualize the impact of the Email system on the storage requirements.

Significant increase in the storage requirements will also impact the back office operational routines such as back-up / restore and it will also make things complex in DR planning for business continuity.

One solution which can be considered to tackle this problem is capability to minimize the no. of document copies that are generated & stored.

Imagine only these employees generate 1 MB of the document and the same copy will be shared with other employees. Based on our above mentioned scenario, storage requirement will get reduced by 100 GB

With the availability of Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 from Microsoft, this capability is available now!

Site Mailbox – it leverages the combined power of Email storage capability of Exchange 2013 & Document storage capability of SharePoint 2013.

Instead of sending document as attachment in every email, he can save it in the Site mailbox. So that only one copy will exist; for the end users, they can still have the same experience as if they are accessing the document from the Email attachment.

Site mailboxes can be accessed by the users from the Outlook in a seamless manner, without compromising the native “Outlook” experience

In addition to storage optimization, Site Mailbox provides more benefits to an Enterprise …really more  !!….