PST files create major problems for companies including the following:
- They allow users to retain email longer than companies need or want to keep email for.
- When a company has an e-Discovery request or other type of search, because of PSTs, they often have to spend a considerable amount of time and money copying data from employee desktops and laptops and searching through a mountain of information.
- Employees can intentionally (leaving the company) or accidentally (leaving a laptop in the airport) give up the valuable company knowledge in their email to competitors or hackers.
- PST files are typically on PCs that aren’t backed up, exposing the employee and the company to lost information and productivity.
- Many employees copy PST files to network hard drives to ensure they are backed up. As such, GBs or TBs of redundant email (each PST in a company often contains many duplicate messages since many individuals may have received the same email) clog up shared drives. Some companies estimate 25% – 60% of shared drive storage and backup comes from PST files.
- In addition, every time a PST file is opened (whether modified or not), it “looks” like a changed file to incremental backup programs. This means PST backup is highly redundant and inefficient.
- Finally, users often spend considerable time managing PST files themselves.
So let’s get to the root of the issue? Why do users create PST files?
At the heart of it, one of the fundamental reasons users love PSTs is that it allows them to get around the company mailbox limits often imposed in Microsoft Exchange to keep the email server efficient, fast and easy to backup. Mailbox “quotas” attempt to solve the email storage problem but instead shift it to the “underground archives” sitting on employee PCs.
If employees instead had an unlimited email archive integrated into their email, controlled by company policies and fully-searchable, PST files become a great deal less relevant.
So to enforce your PST policies, start at the source by eliminating the need for PSTs altogether, get an email archiving solution. Download SophiaEA now clicking HERE.
