Having spent a great deal of time in conversations about electronic communications over the years and hearing about the pains, needs, and problems, I thought taking a look at this from the enterprise-level and the end-user perspective would be worthwhile.  This will be a two part post with the first one focused on the enterprise perspective.

Here’s a quick list of what I believe drives the enterprise around electronic communications:

• Threat protection – keeping nasty stuff like viruses and spam out of the network, protecting against intrusion, zombies, hacking, etc.
• Archiving – storing primarily emails in some way other than pst files, Exchange stores, or back-up tapes
• e-Discovery/Retrieval – getting at the stuff you have now saved per above in a way that is fast, efficient, and consistent with a subpoena
• Information security/safeguards – clamping down on both the malicious and non-malicious release of sensitive information via electronic channels
• Access controls – making sure the right people can access sensitive information
• Process controls – ensuring adherence to defined procedures for core business processes (contracts, invoicing, customer care, etc.)
• Audit trails – proving that you have proper controls and oversight in place of your environment – we’ll throw compliance in here as well like NASD 3010-mandated email surveillance
• Operational costs – the money spent on hardware, bandwidth, software, and staff to run all this stuff
• Productivity – making sure that the applications and tools available to the company increase productivity so more can be done with less headcount
• Risk & liability – ensuring that breaches don’t occur, incidents are properly handled, and the "smoking gun" doesn’t happen