FrontBridge protects e-mail in more ways than one

As the events of 9/11, the Northeast blackout, a variety of hurricanes and the odd tornado have so clearly demonstrated, an organization’s communications infrastructure can quickly be disabled. Because the vast majority of organizations are so reliant on their messaging infrastructure to conduct day-to-day business, and because so much of a typical user’s critical information is stored somewhere in a messaging system, loss of messaging capability – or worse, loss of the message store itself – can be devastating. What is needed is a way to make sure that even if a messaging system goes down temporarily, messages are still getting through and will be accessible after messaging services have been restored.

One method of ensuring that messaging capability stays up and running is to use a disaster recovery service, basically a third party that will receive your messages and relay them to you. When your messaging servers go down, your incoming messages are simply spooled to disk, waiting for your messaging servers to come back online.

Last week, FrontBridge Technologies announced its TrueProtect Message Management Suite, an adjunct to the company’s hosted messaging threat protection business. Although FrontBridge’s primary business is hosted spam filtering and virus filtering, the infrastructure is well suited to storing messages in the event customers’ messaging capability fails. This is because customers’ messages at the company’s eight data centers in North America and Europe are spooled to disk temporarily and then erased after the messages have been delivered.

In the event of a messaging server failure at a customer site, the messages simply continue to spool to disk for up to five days. Once the customer’s servers come back online, the messages are then released at a rate that the servers can accept and then erased from FrontBridge’s storage. Further, FrontBridge’s system ensures that messages are actually delivered to their customers before they are erased from storage.

The advantages of such a system are obvious: others never get a bounce-back on messages they send you, and all of your messages are available when your messaging system comes back online. FrontBridge’s system does not reestablish your mail service on a moment’s notice as some other disaster recovery systems do, but it does provide a level of messaging continuity that an in-house system alone simply can’t provide. The FrontBridge service starts at $345 per month.