Email and Availability ñ keeping your inbox up

By Sri Sridharan, Vice President, Solutions Services Group, Stratus

There are many definitions of what is ëmission criticalí to businesses, but on the whole the term has been applied to applications that a company is completely dependent upon to keep it operating. Many organisations rely in the main on industry-specific applications, such as incident response systems in the emergency services, electronic batch recording in manufacturing or EPOS systems in the retail sector. However, there is one application on which almost all organisations are now dependent upon and that is email.

Five years ago, if a Microsoft Exchange server was to go down for a couple of hours, an organisation would collectively sigh, staff would shrug their shoulders and get on with other tasks while the IT department would scramble to rectify the situation. Ongoing communications might have been affected, and people might have been forced to use the phone more than normal, but generally speaking email downtime would not have brought an organisation to its knees.

Now, reliance on email has increased and the expectation is that email will be responded to immediately. As a result of this change in attitude, the effects of downtime can be severe: deadlines can be missed, sales orders cannot be processed with customers taking their trade elsewhere, and service level agreements may be broken. As more people and processes rely on email, so the effects of downtime are magnified. Email is not just a standalone service ñ it is now a vital component of tools such as CRM systems, corporate websites and order processing engines. As departments such as sales and customer service rely on email, it is seen as a vital tool for revenue generation. Lost business and reduced user productivity combine to put an extremely high price tag on email downtime.

These factors explain why organisations are increasingly making sure their email platform is robust and reliable. It is now vital for any organisation to consider the availability of email to its end-users and to ensure that the service remains available. In many respects end-users remain unconcerned about any problems affecting IT, provided the service is available to them; the reasons behind any issues affecting the data centre are of little concern to them.

The impact of downtime can also stretch beyond just the incident itself. Even a very short period when email is unavailable can lead to a long stretch of time spent just catching up on work. The loss of an email server also affects the IT team that has to get things back on track; and all of an organisationís employees also have to catch up on their own workloads once service is resumed. This effect on productivity can be the most disruptive consequence of downtime.

A recent Gartner study found that 19% of email downtime was due to connectivity problems, but by far the biggest cause of email not being available was server hardware failure, which accounted for 35% of all failures. Increasingly IT managers are being forced to take a very close look at the reliability of their hardware, as well as their network infrastructure.

Backing up data such as email will help the recovery process, but it does little to maintain availability. Not only is downtime very costly, it can also be very tricky to recover from a failure. The amount of resources required in order to get the email system back up and running can be a lot more expensive than the cost of preventing downtime in the first place.

Generally employees will be quicker to notice if email is not coming through than if there is a problem with any other application. IT managers are left to face the wrath of colleagues who feel somewhat helpless and unproductive. A proactive approach to email availability is a much better way of ensuring end-users remain constantly connected to their inboxes and that the IT manager has one less challenge to deal with.

Stratus will be exhibiting at the Business Continuity Expo and Conference held at EXCEL Docklands from 28th - 29th March 2007 - the UKís definitive event for managing risk, resilience and recovery. This event will explore the solutions and best practice to ensure operational continuity and protect a companyís interests before during and after an incident.

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