* The consequences of outages becomes more critical with unified communication platforms
The horrible fires in Southern California over the past week, Hurricane Katrina, the blackout in the northeast several years ago, the tornadoes that hit the Midwest every year, a faulty RAID controller and the occasional rat that chews through electrical cabling can knock out e-mail service for hours or days or even weeks at a time. While the situation is critical when e-mail service is unavailable, unified communications will make the issue much worse when both telephony and e-mail share a centralized infrastructure.
The consequences of an outage can be very damaging. A study we did recently found that one in five organizations estimates they could lose up to a half million dollars in the event of a major e-mail outage. Aside from the monetary impact, there is the damage to an organization’s reputation, the damage to its brand and the inability for its employees to be as productive as they otherwise could be.
In general, the faster the recovery time, the more expensive the solution. Systems that provide hot standby e-mail systems or mirroring usually provide rapid recovery, but are typically expensive. Electronic vaulting or journaling, on the other hand, while less expensive, provide recovery times that might not be acceptable. What organizations need, therefore, is a system that provides the best of both worlds.
In planning a disaster recovery solution, organizations need to answer several questions: How much e-mail data loss is acceptable following a disaster? How much time between the beginning of an e-mail service loss and e-mail recovery is acceptable? What quantifiable or other benefits would there be in speeding up the recovery process?
We will be hosting a Webinar this week on the topic of disaster recovery and will be discussing one company’s offerings focused on disaster recovery in Exchange environments. You can sign up for this no-charge Webinar here.
Editor’s note: Starting Tuesday, Nov, 13, the Unified Communications newsletter will be merged with the Antispam News Alert and will be named the “Unified Communications Alert.” Subscribers to the HTML version of this newsletter will notice some enhancements that will provide you with access to more resources relevant to unified communications. You will still receive Michael Osterman’s analysis of this market, which you will be able to read in its entirety online at NetworkWorld.com, along with links to relevant news headlines of the day. We hope you enjoy the enhancements and we thank you for reading Network World newsletters.
