* Business continuity options for e-mail systems
Last week’s onslaught of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina was yet another indication that messaging is vulnerable to major disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods and other calamities. However, much smaller disasters, as simple as a leak in a sprinkler pipe above a server room, can have equally devastating results on the ability of a company to maintain 100% uptime for its e-mail system.
There are a variety of options that an organization can implement to make their e-mail system invulnerable to such disasters.
The most expensive of these is to operate two internal data centers that are geographically separate, so that in the event one goes offline, the other simply takes over and maintains continuity of the e-mail system. However, the cost of personnel, hardware, software, facilities, telecommunications and the other stuff needed to maintain a duplicate data center is not trivial. Conservatively, such a duplicate data center could run $15 to $20 per user per month, so a 1,000-user organization could spend upwards of $200,000 annually to make its system disaster-proof.
Another option is to implement a back-up e-mail system that can cut over very quickly in the event of a failure of the main system. These systems can make it look to the outside world like nothing has changed with your e-mail system. Internally, users can be switched over from the primary system to a back-up Webmail system that provides key data, such as messages from the recent past, calendar information, etc. These systems are significantly less expensive than maintaining a duplicate facility and offer most of the functionality of the primary system.
A third option is to use hosted messaging services. Complete hosted messaging, in which internal server functions are provided by a third party, makes a company’s e-mail system virtually disaster-proof. Service providers that offer messaging hygiene functions also can provide a form of business continuity by spooling e-mail on their servers until their customers’ servers are back online. While the latter option does not provide real-time access to e-mail during the disaster, at least the outside world can still send you messages without getting bouncebacks.
Yet another option is simply to provide employees with personal Webmail accounts, although this is only marginally better than having no such capability because of the difficulty of making sure that everyone is aware of fellow users’ addresses and the fact that e-mail to your primary domain bounces during the disaster.
A recent survey we completed found that one in five organizations has not deployed any disaster recovery systems. Whatever the solution, it’s critical for organizations of all sizes to have a disaster recovery plan of some kind and to implement systems that will keep the e-mail flowing no matter the weather.
