Dubai : E-mail transactions in the Middle East are set to grow by 20 per cent this year with companies trying to cut communication costs such as telephone and fax due to economic downturn, an industry official said.
Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast, a unified e-mail management solutions company, said, "E-mail is the most preferred business communication tool in the Middle East, accounting for 97 per cent of business-based communication. But its management system needs to be recognised as central to success in this exciting, dynamic and growing marketplace."
The number of internet users in the UAE is put at 2.9 million while in the Gulf it is 12.9 million and in the Middle East at around 57.5 million.
"Around 30 per cent of internet users use corporate e-mail, representing 870,000 users for UAE, 3.9 million users for Gulf and 17.1 million for the Middle East.
"Each user is expected to have 25 email transactions per day, which will in turn count for 21 million e-mail transactions in the UAE, 97.5 million in Gulf and 427 million for the Middle East," Bauer said.
Companies face the challenge of building capacity to handle this surge of information traffic.
From a compliance perspective, IT managers have to effectively manage, store and support retrieval of e-mail data on demand.
Integrating an e-mail management system that satisfies regulation from different countries is not simple.
Companies that have grown over time to implement separate systems for e-mail storage, archiving, security and continuity have ended up with a fragmented architecture that groans under the task of safeguarding growing e-mail traffic.
"Businesses can refine this complexity — and the demands on IT support — by looking for a single, efficient platform that offers the flexibility to expand and upgrade as operations grow, without compromising functionality, compliance or security," Bauer said.
Considering the pace of economic development in the Middle East, it is not surprising to find that often businesses — in fact entire industries — have grown without a clear foundation of compliance upon which to operate. Organisations in the region are under pressure to improve transparency and accountability, both of which rely on a structured and comprehensive information management system.
According to Bauer, more than 2,500 companies around the world have replaced multiple, on-premise point solutions with software as a service (SaaS) subscription, significantly reducing the risk and complexity of e-mail management.
The right ‘cloud' provider can substantially reduce the headache of managing and ensuring compliance by providing an audit trail of e-mail activity across user accounts, as well as saving costs.
