Email continuity - bracing your business for unpredictable interruptions

Email has become a business critical application and any disruption in email continuity leads to disruption in business. With so much at stake, every business needs to have an email continuity strategy in place. Simply backing up your email server won’t help; you need to employ a managed service provider who offers high email availability to help businesses cope up with unannounced email outages.

Here are a few reasons why your company needs an uninterrupted email solution.

Organizations Can’t Rely on Their Email Server Alone

According to MessageOne survey findings, 72% companies experienced unplanned email outages in a year.  Out of these outages, 71% outages lasted for more than four hours. Just imagine your sales and marketing staff, customer service staff not having access to email for hours. Such interruptions can bring your business to a standstill which will ultimately lead to revenue loss.

With uninterrupted email solution in place, you can prevent such interruptions. Even if your mail server fails, the email server managed by your email continuity service will continue to receive your emails. The vendor can also provide a web interface to access and reply to the emails. It means your employees only need a working Internet connection to continue with their business as usual.

Backing up Email Server Does Not Guarantee Email Continuity

Many companies employ different strategies for business continuity including backing up their Exchange server. You need to understand backup addresses recovery. If your email server fails, it causes email disruption. A backup of Exchange server only ensures there is no loss of data or email and you can get it back on the restored server.

The IT staff may require a few hours to a day or more to restore the backup on a different server. Your organization will not have access to email unless the backup restoration is completed. This is not email continuity, it is email recovery. You should not get confused between them.

Understanding Email Continuity

Email continuity refers to the resumption of managed email service within a few minutes after your regular email disruption occurs due to any reason. In some cases, your employees may not even sense their regular email service has broken down.

The uninterrupted email solution vendor continually monitors the status of the email system. In an event of email disruption, the managed service takes over automatically. Here are some distinct benefits of uninterrupted email solution.

Never Miss a Mail Again

Every business email is important. When you employ an uninterrupted email solution, your email system never faces a discontinuity. The service is integrated with your email server. If any interruption occurs, the managed uninterrupted email solution kicks in.

Freedom from Worries

With email continuity solution in place, you never have to worry about email disruption again. If the company’s Exchange server crashes, the IT staff is free to fully concentrate on recovery of a mail server and not worry about email disruption.

No Additional Investment

Email continuity is offered as SaaS (Software as a Service) solution and the organization is not required to purchase hardware or software to enjoy the benefits offered by uninterrupted email service.

So, What strategy do you employ for uninterrupted email communication?