Why always-on-business requires always-on-email
More mobile workers, more demanding customers, global competition, the increasing need for business agility, sheer convenience; there’s a range of reasons why email has become so important for modern business. The vast majority of decision makers rate email as a mission-critical business resource for communicating and transferring files; email remains the preferred business communications channel for 93% of enterprise users, most information workers rely on email more than even the telephone and substantial amounts of business-critical data is stored in email.
Email is business critical
Email isn’t just a list of messages. It’s purchase orders, contracts, proposals, enquiries, customer orders, business documents and discussions. Email is the way nearly every business makes decisions and gets work done, complete with the context of how and why those decisions were made, stored in a way humans can make sense of intuitively. But email servers were designed for delivering messages rather 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 departments and managers need and like any other IT system they’re subject to viruses, power outages, natural disasters, corruption, human error
and media failures.
If the mail system fails, the results range from lost productivity to losing orders and customers; from fines and litigation to business failure within a surprisingly short period of time. Therefore making sure that email stays available is a key part of any business continuity plan. However only a third of businesses would be able to continue using email without any interruption or data loss in the event of server failure. Nearly as many (29%) have no contingency plans and would have to resort to private email addresses and phone calls or simply send employees home.
Getting the business back online
Business continuity involves much more than just disaster recovery. If a business is to be able to take any disaster in its stride, it needs to be able to operate during the recovery process, and provide tools to deliver key business services without full access to central business systems. A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is an important tool for any organization as it allows recovery coordinators to identify key processes and people. The resulting plan will bring these people and processes online as soon as possible after any major incident in order to ensure that the business can communicate with customers and staff. A BCP also allows a business to testits continuity approach, with targets that must be met.