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Fujitsu Siemens Computers has warned European businesses that compliance is about to become as much of an issue for them, as it already is for their US counterparts.

Users struggling to deal with growing volumes of data - especially email - will find their task made even more difficult by the EU Directive on auditing and corporate governance, the company said. The directive is sometimes referred to as EuroSOX because of its resemblance to the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act, also called SOX.

To help deal with the increase in corporate governance requirements, Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) has allied with EMC, NetApp and Symantec in an Efficient Email initiative, said FSC storage product marketing director Marcus Schneider. Targeted at users of Microsoft Exchange, the initiative combines storage systems from FSC, EMC and NetApp with Symantec Enterprise Vault and EMC EmailXtender software.

EU member states must implement EU Directives in national law. Some, such as Austria, have already implemented EuroSOX, while others have yet to do so, for example Germany, Schneider said, speaking at Storage Networking World Europe in Frankfurt, Germany.

"Email will be where companies have the biggest problem meeting the EU Directive," he predicted. He said that most corporate departments already have archiving strategies in place, but many companies have yet to get a grip on the huge growth in email usage.

"The big issue with email was that it was leaking information in and out, but email growth also has many other problems," he said. "For example, mailbox quotas often mean highly-paid people spend hours every day dragging and dropping messages between folders just to clear out their inboxes."

Worse still, he said, is the approach still taken by some companies of automatically deleting email after 30 days to save space.

The Efficient Email initiative includes message indexing in a central archive, which takes away the need for individual users to manage their own mailbox quotas, plus automated back-office compliance. Users can set their own archiving policies that are then carried out automatically overnight, Schneider said.

"People use email to make agreements with partners and customers, and you have to keep those, but a PST [Outlook mail folder] backup on a local hard disk isn't enough," he said. "These companies know they have a problem and they know they need to address it."

He added that FSC has put a questionnaire online to help people understand how they use email today, and advise them on how they could improve their productivity.

FSC also announced two CentricStor virtual tape libraries (VTLs) at the Frankfurt show. The VTLs are pure disk, and do not then copy backups on to tape.