Implementing email storage quotas to reduce company costs

¶ … Instate an Email Storage Limitation

Addressed to the Chief Information Officer of the company

The issue of email storage limitation should be approached in the next meeting

Description of current situation

The issue of email storage has not been raised up until now as the management desired to grant their employees full access to Internet browsing and emailing, moreover since the nature of the work performed by them required constant computerized communications amongst themselves, with the management and with the company's customers. This view was generally shared by most departments in the company so far. However, given the growth of the company, the Finance and Accounting Department believes a quota limitation should be imposed on the company email.

More explicitly, the company's growth refers to the increased number of customers and tasks engaged in and consequently, a significant increase in the number employees. These increases have generated a more extensive usage of the Internet, and especially emailing, within the company. These increases have themselves brought about costs with the personnel and hardware devices; costs that the company cannot sustain currently based on the registered profits alone, as the profit increased slower than the costs. The Finance and Accounting Department insists on measures to be taken to reduce costs, and the first among these measures should be that of limiting the email storage space.

The company has internal serves that store the incoming and outgoing emails and two network specialists delegated with administrating and storing the emails. The two network specialists were perfectly able to cope with the tasks when they only dealt with the emails sent and received by forty employees. However, since during the past year the number of employees has close to tripled, they are currently unable to cope with the entire amount of tasks.

This automatically means that the company will have to hire at least three more network specialists to handle the administration and storage of emails. Furthermore, aside from human resource costs, unlimited email storage brings about hardware costs due to an increased necessity to purchase new hard-disks, CDs, DVDs or other devices on which to backup and store the emails. Also, the increased cost of creating and storing back-ups for all the incoming and outgoing messages needs to be minimized.

2. The proposal

In a nutshell, unlimited email storage on the company's servers generates the need for more network specialists and more storage devices, implicitly leading to an increase in the company's costs. In order to prevent and reduce these costs, the Finance and Accounting Department presents the management with the proposal to instate a quota limitation on the email storage for the employees.

The software department believes the new generated costs to be legitimate and does not support the proposal made by the Finance Department. They argue that the company's growth in number of customers and employees has generated sufficient profits to cover the costs. However, based on the data in the annual budget, the Finance and Accounting Department points out that profits have increased at a slower rate than the costs, placing the company in the impossibility to afford any more expenses.

The proposal made by the Finance and Accounting Department is to limit the storage of sent and received emails to 100 Mb. This space would again be divided into two categories, one for sent emails and one for received emails. As such, the space allocated to incoming messages would be of 40 megabytes and the space allocated to outgoing messages would be of 60 megabytes. In order to insure the beneficial outcomes of such a measure, the company needs to implement the email storage limitation starting with the first month of the second quarter of the current year.

3. Arguments in favor of email limitation

The arguments in favor of installing a quota limitation on email storage generally refer to the benefits such an action would generate. The benefits are both the theoretical ones deduced by the Finance and Accounting Department, as well as the practical benefits registered by other companies that have applied this technique with the utmost success. The benefits primarily refer to reducing costs, increasing employee awareness and responsibility, easing the work of the network administrators and limiting the Internet traffic with large files.

Cost reduction

The primary argument that supports imposing a quota limitation on email storage refers to cost reduction. Unlimited email storage generates two types of costs: personnel costs and hardware costs.

The personnel costs imply the necessity to hire more personnel to deal with the administration, backup and storage of emails. As there is no current limitation, employees fail to delete the old and unnecessary emails in their inbox and outbox, forcing network administrators to store them on hardware devices. However, the hardware devices have limited capacity (700Mb for compact disks, 4.5 up to 9 (dual layer) or 30 (blue ray) gigabytes for DVDs and up to 160 gigabytes for computer hard disks), and when they are full they need to be replaced with new devices, which generate hardware costs.

If an email storage limitation is imposed, employees will be announced when their emails are reaching the limit and will be advised to delete the unnecessary files. This means that the employees will administrate, store and delete the emails themselves according to their available hardware capacity. The consequence of this would be a significant decrease in personnel and hardware costs.

Furthermore, when being faced with the task of managing their emails, employees will automatically increase their level of awareness and responsibility while also easing the network administrator's job.

4. Implementing email limitation

The actual implementation of an email limit refers to a simple procedure that can easily be performed by the network administrator, without any external interference from other it specialists.

Once the management decides in favor of the quota limitation to 100 megabytes starting with the second quarter of 2007, the network administrator will access the server options and set the email limit. As soon as the setting are saved on the local servers, employees will be unable to store more than 100 Mb worth of email on their computers.

The easiness of implementing a quota limit on email is one of the most relevant advantages of internally hosting the email addresses on the private servers of the company's and along with the benefits of reduced costs and better Internet connections, give the management strong proof of the necessity to set an email storage limit of 100 megabytes for an email address starting with the second quarter of 2007.

5. Conclusions

Compared to the same period of the previous year, 2007 has brought about increases in personnel, number of customers, tasks and responsibilities. These increases have themselves generated additional profits, but also costs. However the Information Technology Department feels that the profits cover the costs, the Financial Department contradicts them stating that the profits have increased at a slower rate than the costs, and insisting that measures be taken.

The immediate action proposed by the Finance and Accounting Department regards the installment of an email storage limitation. The new quota limit would significantly decrease the personnel costs and hardware costs adherent to an unlimited email access. The personnel costs would be minimized as a limited email access only requires a maximum of two network specialists to handle the hardware and software of the computer network and Internet connectivity, whereas an unlimited email access needs at least five network specialists. Furthermore, a limitation of the incoming and outgoing emails would also require less storing hardware devices, generating economies in this area.

Aside from the personnel and hardware cost reductions, implementing a quota limitation on the company's emails would also increase the responsibility and awareness level of the employees which would have to manage themselves their computerized communications. In addition, it would insure a better Internet connectivity at a more rapid speed.

The benefits previously mentioned, aside with the easiness of implementation are strong arguments to convince the management to approve the 100Mb quota limitation starting with the second quarter of the current year.