Think of all the amount of correspondence contained in your daily email exchanges that you carry out at the office. It is how your employees communicate with your customers, schedule their meetings, keep calendars up to date, drive sales proposals through, answer client’s and colleague’s questions and much more. With so much precious information at stake, it is vital that your corporate email servers be backed up constantly – which has to go far beyond the server backup that guarantees continued use of email.
Most email users spend at least a quarter of every day reading or writing emails. They spend far less time on the telephone or engaged in face to face conversations or communicating on social media. It is a sad fact that at some point every email server will fail at some point. Around 26% of all organizations suffer downtime each and every month of at least 30 minutes.12% of organizations have outages of around two hours each and every month. Depending on the root cause of the failure, recovery takes anywhere between a couple of hours to 48 or 72 hours. Without an emergency system ready to fall back on all employees have no option but to do nothing until the system is sorted out.
During an email outage users resort to seeking out other ways of communicating, often using personal email accounts to send time-sensitive information out. Unplanned downtime forces IT staff to drop everything and address the email issue, , making them unproductive while the emergency is dealt with. Any incoming emails are bounced back to their senders so that their queries go unanswered and many urgent messages are delayed or lost completely as a consequence.
True email continuity means being able to utilise email within moments of its being lost. Some systems are so automatic that users do not detect the failure when it happens – only the IT team really knows the difference. A range of continuity options are available, all give you the ability to both send and receive messages, plus a way to archive them outside of the primary server and a way for users to immediately access new messages and old ones. An Email continuity system should resemble the users’ primary email client to prevent confusion and helpdesk queries whilst the system is down.
In comparison to disaster recovery appliances (which are usually expensive to maintain despite their low purchase cost), cloud-based providers are by far the fastest and easiest solution. Cloud-based services have an uptime of 99.99%. They are set up without your having to install any hardware or download additional software. It also comes with third-party management which gives your IT staff a break and reduces your on-site power and storage. Employees enjoy continuous productivity with uninterrupted access to all stored messages as well as constant connectivity from their mobile phone or tablet. Cloud-based services also allow for seamless integration with other cloud-based archiving solutions, which many firms are using because it represents practically bottomless storage.
More and more studies show that a growing number of businesses are transferring to cloud-based email for its benefits of lower cost, reliability and service continuity. Their corporate email systems gain heightened spam and virus protection while becoming easier to maintain, access and archive.
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