Email Continuity – the Crucial Piece of the Puzzle

Email is a vital part of business communication. When email is down it means a reduction in productivity, possible regulatory and compliance issues due to data being lost, and can even result in lost revenue if email support is part of your service. Ensuring email continuity is increasingly becoming an important part of the business messaging infrastructure, because it aids recovery and disaster prevention strategies.Business continuity and risk management practices should incorporate continuity as priority. But it is important that organisations do not confuse email continuity with email archiving or backups. Archiving and backups are essential to disaster recovery, but continuity provides seamless access and use of email when downtime occurs or when more serious disasters happen.Impacts of email outages on organisationsIn an ‘always on’ world, businesses are used to email always being available, so even when a server is down even for a few minutes it can be enough to have IT phones ringing off the hook. While a couple minutes of down time isn’t doesn’t spell catastrophe, when down time stretches to hours or even days it can have a significant impact on the organisation. It’s important that businesses consider the impact of email down time on business functions, and find an email continuity solution that works for them.Outages and email downtime are a reality of business. It is likely that at some point something will go awry and when it does most businesses are unprepared. Physical hardware will age and eventually fail, and failures can sometimes pre-empt a scheduled hardware update leaving a company in the lurch.Stopping email outagesOn a positive note, email outages can be alleviated for nominal cost, but due to confusion between email backup and archiving solutions and email continuity, businesses are missing out on a crucial piece of the business continuity puzzle.While a business disaster recovery strategy may cover the rebuilding of hardware and recovery of historical emails from an archive or backup, which is very different to continuity in that continuity, allows seamless access to emails while the communication infrastructure is rebuilt. So no matter what happens an off-site solution should be in place that provides continuous email despite what may happen to a business’s internal network, server or data.Hosted ServicesMoving your email continuity solution off site to an external provider allows your business to avoid lulls in productivity and other negative impacts email outages can cause. Using an external continuity solution is important regardless of whether email archiving or backups are in use. On-premise solutions are vulnerable to network issues, which is why it’s crucial that continuity is hosted externally so that email will keep flowing even if there is a problem with the businesses networking and infrastructure.Hosted Email Continuity – what to look for?A good continuity service should cost less than the mail infrastructure.The vendor should have 24/7 support, whether it be by phone or email.A vendor should provide a reasonable service level agreement.Continuity hosting should require minimal expense and be quick to set-up.A vendor should have servers geographically distributed to ensure a reliable service.Maintenance on the businesses side should be minimal.Is should be easy to use, the learn curve for the continuity service should be steep.Email is the primary form of communication and few businesses can afford to suffer outages with-out a reliable email continuity service in place. Protect your business with 24/7 email uptime and automated email services that make looking after your businesses email simple again.