Spam, spam, spam. Who cares about spam? According to META Group analysis, the trend is shifting with security and stability slated to become the top email concerns by 2007.
Research group META Group said that as email, instant messaging and Web-conferencing continue to increase, organisations need to create secure, affordable infrastructure will intensify.
Matt Cain, vice-president of technology research at META Group in the US, said email priorities would thereby shift 'dramatically' from today's concerns about spam and online policies in the workplace.
'In the next four years, email will unquestionably become more deeply entrenched, more valuable, and therefore more critical to the well-being of the organisation,' Cain said.
META Group sees stability as the number one email concern by 2007. Organisations would need to upgrade infrastructures to bring system reliability to 100 percent during business hours.
Security and hygiene would remain important, with spam controlled by various filtering techniques and batched email security services. Multiple vendors were likely to join together to offer packages handling denial-of-service attacks, mail loops, virus and spam protection, harvest-attack abatement, content blocking and policy management, according to META Group.
The third most important email concern would be centralisation, coupled with stability and hygiene. Organisations by 2007 would begin applying data centre operational disciplines to email, the analyst stated.
The research firm believes companies will begin to use a combination of simplified public and private key distribution and rigid policy enforcement to target issues associated with email encryption.
Companies would also seek to use a mix of client server and gateway-based policy enforcement tools that adhere to government and corporate archiving and records management policies, META Group said.
It found that mailbox overload would be the sixth-biggest email problem on the must-solve list with organisations seeking to prioritise and categorise incoming emails using filters and other tools.
Companies would increasingly have to find answers on how to provide and service email sent to a growing crop of mobile devices including pagers, mobile phones and PDAs, according to the analyst.
Email problem number eight on most company lists by 2007 would be upgrades associated with Microsoft Exchange. Microsoft is expected to deliver a version of Exchange based on SQL Server, which would be a major change from the current database, META Group said.
The ninth most important email-related problem for organisations would be 'right-sizing', as email economics drive down costs via centralisation and standardisation across their knowledge base.
Problem number 10 would be managing the overall email-based knowledge base within a business. Knowledge management services promoting best business practice were thus likely to grow strongly by about 2007, META Group said.