Although last week's anniversary of that horrible Tuesday five years ago reminds us of many things, it should bring to mind two things in the context of how to manage our messaging systems.

First, because messaging is so important to how organizations do business, it is absolutely critical to protect the message store. E-mail, as the primary file transport and file storage mechanism for many organizations, contains most of the information that individuals need to perform their job. During a power outage or e-mail server downtime incident, information workers are typically much less productive - imagine not having access to your messaging system for at least the next several days because of an act of terrorism, a flood, a fire, a hurricane or (insert your disaster here).

The preventive for this sort of problem is, at a minimum, keeping a current copy of your message store in two geographically separate locations using some sort of replication technology, a managed service provider or at least shipping frequent backups off-site. There are a variety of tools available for this purpose. Ideally, however, you should implement a backup messaging capability that gives your users a fully functional backup messaging capability, using your corporate domain(s), and at least a few weeks of recent sent and received e-mail.

Even more important than protecting your messages, however, is protecting the people who create them. An organization of any size should have a means of contacting employees and others through some sort of emergency notification system. This would allow all employees to be notified proactively on any device and at any location about important information, and it would allow those employees to provide feedback to the company about their condition and other important information.

Clearly, the cost of implementing these technologies is not trivial and is made even more difficult because of competing and important priorities within any IT organization. The cost of not deploying them, however, could be substantially higher.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.