Thursday, December 29, 2011

Good Email Continuity Gives You Solid Productivity

By Jennifer Flowers


Think of all the amount of correspondence contained in your daily email exchanges that you carry out at the office. It is how your employees communicate with your customers, schedule their meetings, keep calendars up to date, drive sales proposals through, answer client's and colleague's questions and much more. With so much precious information at stake, it is vital that your corporate email servers be backed up constantly - which has to go far beyond the server backup that guarantees continued use of email.

Most email users spend at least a quarter of every day reading or writing emails. They spend far less time on the telephone or engaged in face to face conversations or communicating on social media. It is a sad fact that at some point every email server will fail at some point. Around 26% of all organizations suffer downtime each and every month of at least 30 minutes.12% of organizations have outages of around two hours each and every month. Depending on the root cause of the failure, recovery takes anywhere between a couple of hours to 48 or 72 hours. Without an emergency system ready to fall back on all employees have no option but to do nothing until the system is sorted out.

The effects of an email outage are multiple and varied. Users commonly resort to seeking out other methods of communication in lieu of corporate email, often utilizing personal accounts to send critical or time-sensitive information. Also, unexpected downtime forces IT staffers to drop everything and address the issue, bringing their productivity to a halt while the emergency is tended to. In the meantime, incoming emails are bounced back to senders, queries go unanswered and other urgent messages are delayed or lost entirely.

A real email continuity solution means being able to use email within seconds of your normal system being lost. Some systems respond so quickly that users cannot even detect the failure. It should only be the IT team really knows the continuity system is running. There are several continuity options available, all of them give you the ability to continue to send and receive e-mails. It also archives all messages outside of the primary server plus allows all users to immediately access new messages as they arrive as well as all of their old ones. Ideally, the Email continuity system should be exactly the same as the users' primary email provider to prevent them from becoming confused.

Compared to other disaster recovery applications (which are oftentimes expensive to maintain despite their low initial purchase cost), cloud-based is the fastest and easiest solution, by far. Cloud-based services have uptime of at least 99.99%. You do not have to install any hardware or download any software. Third-party management is included, which means your IT staff do not have to be involved in setting up or running the system. You also need no onsite storage, which reduces power demands too. Your employees enjoy uninterrupted access to stored messages, plus, constant connectivity via their mobile phones. Cloud-based services also offer seamless integration with cloud-based archiving, which many companies are using because it offers them unlimited storage.

A growing number of firms and organizations are moving to cloud-based email services because it costs less, is more reliable and easier to set up. Corporate email systems also get better virus and spam protection. They are also far easier to access, maintain and archive.




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