Email as Part of a Business Continuity Strategy
Few businesses could function without email, and email provides a critical coordination tool during an outage. Yet, due to the cost and complexity of providing true email continuity, many businesses do not have business continuity plans that protect email adequately.
Continuity and archiving services may prove more cost-effective for email than high availability clustering, especially when considered in light of continued governance, risk mitigation and compliance.
Email has become an integral part of business and it’s crucial to include it in business continuity planning. Email systems will inevitably fail, but the business can assess the risks and provision systems to avoid the costs of lengthy email outages.
But traditional approaches to availability and recovery may not offer adequate protection for email systems at an affordable price, especially since it is now often a legal obligation as well as a business necessity to ensure that no messages are lost. Indeed, email is particularly important during a disaster when staff will need to keep in touch more urgently than usual. And, because they will be under more stress, providing a transparent and familiar system is key.
Invoking a business continuity plan is expensive and, therefore, reserved for significant disasters. To this end, a service-based email continuity solution may well be the best approach for both reliability and cost. Having an email continuity solution that can be invoked at minimal cost and with minimal disruption provides the additional benefit of providing flexibility in the patching and upgrading of the email server.
See Email as Part of a Business Continuity Strategy: Why always-on business requires always-on email, a white paper from Iron Mountain and Computerworld (registration required).
Tags: email, Iron Mountain
