Posted on 27 August 2008

A new independent survey, commissioned by web-based email  management experts Mimecast, reveals that just 36% of businesses are fully prepared to continue sending and receiving emails without interruption or loss of data in the event of a server failure.  The findings show that 29% of companies have no contingency plans in place and are forced to resort to private email or phone, or go home or down the pub when email is down. 

The survey, carried out amongst over 100 IT directors and managers by independent research company emedia shows the potential for disruption amongst UK businesses given that Gartner estimates that 97% of business based communications are via email.   Of the remaining survey respondents 37% of companies had some contingency plans in place with a failover to a disaster recovery initiated after a period of time. 

According to Tim Pickard, group marketing director at Mimecast, “The findings show a large percentage of businesses are running the risk of severe disruption to their business including the possibility of data loss and reputation risk, not to mention the possibility of regulatory repercussions.  As the chaos caused by last year’s floods and the government’s recent Pitt Report indicate, British businesses are still failing to take adequate steps to protect themselves in the event of an outage whether due to a hardware or network problem, human error, or even  catastrophes like floods, fire and theft.”  

According to Andrew Downie of law firm Shoosmiths, who recently deployed the unified, on-demand email management system from Mimecast, “The pressures for any law firm to have seamless ‘always on’ email continuity are significant. Provisioning for disaster recovery has, in the past, been a very expensive and complex activity but we were particularly impressed with the new Mimecast Services for Outlook feature which allows email users to continue to send and receive emails and access email archives within Outlook in the event of any Microsoft Exchange server downtime, at an affordable cost per user.”  

 

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