Travel Insurance Industry’s Email Problem: Storage strategies for Microsoft customers

Travel insurance industry professionals can all agree on one point: it is difficult to deal with the number of emails that they receive. They may hit that sweet spot, the magic number of people they need to handle the current inbound volume, but they may not be aware of a hidden problem that their IT department will eventually be dealing with. Like everything digital, emails occupy space. And in the digital world, storage space comes at a premium, especially in the context of enterprise business applications. This means that companies need to continuously monitor and manage this precious resource.

While data storage sounds trivial in today’s IT landscape, email storage and management is no joke when you consider the scale at which businesses must utilize it. The size of each individual email is several kilobytes, and, with attachments as are currently seen in travel insurance communications, it could be on average about 15 megabytes. Again, not much in small quantities. But when one pulls back from the individual emails view and looks at the bigger picture over a period of time, things look different.

Travel insurers’ customer service departments receive an unrelenting volume of incoming correspondence. And for any email data managed with a solution like Dynamics 365 Customer Service or Sales, the storage volume creeps up slowly but surely until the company realizes that they are out of storage space.

Buying more storage is the obvious solution. Space within an application’s database is typically the costliest. For example, 1 GB on Microsoft Dataverse, which manages Dynamics 365 CRM data, costs $40 per month. Obviously, most organizations can’t spend $40 frequently.

But then the question becomes: what kind of storage would be better? Many would prefer on-premises storage, justifying that everything remains within their sights and therefore within their control. Having on-premises storage infrastructure brings its own problems like constant monitoring, periodic upgradation, and disaster recovery, just to name a few. Others would move to cloud, correctly trusting AWS, Azure and the like to maintain infrastructure as they buy or, more specifically, rent the storage.

The cost of cloud storage is low compared to the on-premises option, but for emails and their attachment, the storage space will continue to grow and there will come a time when organizations will have to buy or rent new storage space.

The way forward