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46 ADVERTORIAL
ALWAYS-ON-BUSINESS REQUIRES
Business continuity planning for outages
Words: By Mimecast
Email has become an integral part of business and it’s departments and managers need and like any other IT system
crucial to include it in business continuity planning. It’s they’re subject to viruses, power outages, natural disasters,
inevitable that email systems will fail and the business can corruption, human error and media failures.
assess the risks and provision systems to avoid the costs of If the mail system fails, the results range from lost
lengthy email outages. productivity to losing orders and customers; from fines and
But traditional approaches to availability and recovery may litigation to business failure within a surprisingly short period
not offer adequate protection for email systems at an of time
4
. Therefore making sure that email stays available is a
affordable price, especially as it is now often a legal obligation key part of any business continuity plan. However, only a third
as well as a business necessity to ensure that no messages of businesses would be able to continue using email without
are lost. Indeed, email is particularly important during a any interruption or data loss in the event of server failure.
disaster, when staff will need to keep in touch more urgently Nearly as many (29%) have no contingency plans and would
than usual; they will also be under more stress so providing a have to resort to private email addresses and phone calls or
transparent and familiar system is key. simply send employees home
5
.
Invoking a business continuity plan is expensive and therefore
reserved for significant disasters. To this end a service-based Getting the business back online
email continuity solution may well be the best approach for Business continuity involves much more than just disaster
both reliability and cost. Having an email continuity solution recovery. If a business is to be able to take any disaster in
that can be invoked at minimal cost and with minimal disruption its stride, it needs to be able to operate during the recovery
provides the additional benefit of providing flexibility in the process, and provide tools to deliver key business services
patching and upgrading of the email server. without full access to central business systems. A Business
Continuity Plan (BCP) is an important tool for any organisation
Business Continuity Planning for email archiving as it allows recovery coordinators to identify key processes
More mobile workers, more demanding customers, global and people. The resulting plan will bring these people and
competition, the increasing need for business agility, sheer processes online as soon as possible after any major incident
convenience; there’s a range of reasons why email has in order to ensure that the business can communicate with
become so important for modern business. The vast majority customers and staff. A BCP also allows a business to test
of decision makers rate email as a mission-critical business its continuity approach, with targets that must be met.
resource for communicating and transferring files; email
remains the preferred business communications channel for Recovery objectives
93% of enterprise users
1
, most information workers rely on As a first step towards recovery, systems supporting critical
email more than even the telephone
2
and up to 60% of business processes need to be prioritised. The time to bring
business-critical data is stored in email
3
. the service back online is known as the Recovery Time
Objective (RTO). The RTO needs to be as low as possible for
Business impact of outages key processes – preferably zero, assuming the cost is
Email isn’t just a list of messages. It’s purchase orders, realistic. Recovery processes and systems should be available
contracts, proposals, enquiries, customer orders, business at all times, so staff can switch to them as quickly as
documents and discussions. Email is the way nearly every possible. The business also needs to have access to all
business makes decisions and gets work done, complete with process-sensitive data, so that users can communicate
the context of how and why those decisions were made, effectively with customers and the rest of the business staff.
stored in a way humans can make sense of intuitively. But This means that all recovery systems would ideally have a zero
email servers were designed for delivering messages rather Recovery Point Objective (RPO) so no data is lost.
than managing and storing them. They don’t have the
storage capacity or search tools that users want, they don’t
have the administration and reporting tools that IT
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