Over the last 3 years the number of email users at the organizations I serve (Ministry Health Care and Affinity Health System) has increased 17%. In 2008 we had 15,900 mailboxes. Today we have 18,578 mailboxes.
Over that same period our total email storage has increased from 1.5 Terabytes to 5.6 Terabytes. That is a 273% increase.
Interestingly, the top 7% of the mailboxes (1,300) account for 55% of the total storage. My mailbox is the 88th largest (5.3 Gb), this includes deleted and sent items, which I cling to.
These cool stats are courtesy of our Data Center Manager, Dave Roggenbauer and Pete Leonard, System Administrator.
Candid CIO 
With all of the legal and compliance regulations in healthcare, what tools and strategies are MHC and Affinitity utilizing to manage email?
Particularly around archiving, legal holds and enterprise searches
Cedric Parish, PMP
Healthcare/BI Consultant
We are working on this, it prompted the post. Part of Ministry’s 2010 Exchange Server upgrade will include using the archiving capabiltiies to move messages to archive, then back-up, then deletion. There will be the option to flag something to be held longer – but the default is for deletion within some number of months.
Has there been any resulting decrease in the number of phone lines/extensions?
I don’t have data in front of me, but I am confident we have far fewer fax lines than previously. I hope we see that continue to trend to zero. Our work on the state-wide HIE should help. There are still just as many desk phones as we have ever had.
I too refuse to permanently delete deleted or sent mail for the sake of saving space….though at the end of each year I transfer them to a yearly personal folder so I can go back if needed. It has come in handy.
For us healthcare provider, the local copies of email are problematic. Theoretically those are just as subject to eDiscovery requests as the email system. Also, they are still taking up disk space. At this point in time we are planning to eliminate our email users ability to store local copies of email. We want everything on the enterprise system. Afterall, email is a corporate asset – not a personal belonging.