How important is messaging system uptime?

We have just wrapped a survey that asked about messaging system uptime. Here’s what we found.

Uptime is critical to the vast majority of users. Of the organizations surveyed, 77% indicated that messaging system uptime is “extremely important,” while another 19% told us that uptime is “very important.” By contrast, only 16% of organizations told us that reducing the cost of managing their messaging system was “extremely important.”

There is virtually no difference between smaller organizations (with up to 1,000 e-mail users) and larger organizations with regard to the importance they place on e-mail system uptime.

However, a higher percentage of larger organizations tend to have a stricter definition of uptime than do smaller organizations. For example, we found that 8% of smaller organizations would consider the occasional 10-minute downtime to be intolerable, while 22% of larger organizations would consider such downtime to be intolerable. Among smaller organizations, 22% would consider the occasional 10-minute downtime to be inconsequential, compared to a statistically identical 21% among larger organizations.

What we did not investigate in this survey is what uptime-averse organizations are willing to do about ensuring messaging system uptime. For example, are these organizations willing to deploy extremely highly reliable servers that guarantee virtually no downtime? Are they willing to deploy clustering in their messaging systems (assuming they have not done so already)? Are they willing to consider more reliable alternatives to their messaging servers that will ensure that downtime is kept extremely low?

I’d like to get your opinions on the topic of messaging system uptime, particularly in the context of a) what you have found to be the leading causes of downtime in your messaging system, and b) what your organization would be willing to do to decrease downtime to extremely low levels. Please drop me a line at mailto:michael@ostermanresearch.com