Relieving overloaded email systems

Sharing large documents, media files or data files is critical in the workplace and many CIOs rely on email systems because they are easy to use and familiar to most people. But as many IT executives know, making the email system the de facto content management system for communications has its drawbacks including bandwidth and storage constraints and increasing storage costs. Pepperdine University CIO Timothy Chester tells of his trials and tribulations dealing with this issue. At first, he instituted file size limits for the attachments passing through the university's email system but were unable to accommodate users' needs and folks turned to free email services from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google as well as social networks like Facebook and MySpace. That, in turn, created security problems for the IT department.

The solution? Turning to a secure file transfer solution that would be easy to use and cost-effective while at the same time providing relief for the over-burdened email system. In his case, it was Accellion, a product he says allowed students, faculty and staff at the university to use the email technology they already know yet still collaborate on sending large files quickly and easily without an exposure to security risks.

To read more about the Pepperdine IT experience:
- See this CIO Magazine article [1]

For more stories from the FierceCIO network:
> Hard Drive Crusher is serious about security. [2]
> Parallels adds Leopard Server support. [3]
> First Atom devices coming in June. [4]