While the transition has been slow and often frustrating, there’s no denying that email has overtaken fax as business’ preferred method of rapid, written communication. With the ongoing standardisation of stronger email security measures and the gradual uptake of these technologies by product vendors and the corporate world, it’s not too difficult to see email almost completelyeradicating traditional snail-mail within the next ten years for all but the most traditional of businesses. 

Naturally, there are still some hurdles in the way of this progression.

SPAM has become one of the biggest problems of the day, and while technology vendors are spending a large amount of time and effort in solving this problem, it would appear as though a totally SPAM-free Internet is simply a pipe-dream.

Security is another major area of concern. The very nature of the Internet is one of deregulation, designed to permit a free exchange of data and ideas. While this sentiment has been forcefully derailed in recent years in the name of security, the open Internet is still potentially an unsafe environment for corporate data, including email, to transverse.

The third area of consideration is that imposed by regulation and plain-old good business practice. Legacy businesses have spent years developing internal systems to track correspondence from receipt or creation to file. There are laws and statutes governing the retention of business records, and even the methods by which this is achieved. It’s only now that many businesses are waking-up to the fact that these laws do indeed extend to the email realm and that a method to securely archive and index this data is essentially mandatory. A variety of solutions now exist to perform this function, with more in the pipeline. Indeed, email archiving is one of the hottest technologies in IT at the moment.

If you haven't investigated a method for your business, give us a call on 1300 0 JASCO or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  for more information.