Email Continuity: You don’t know what you've got till it's gone

>Email Continuity
You don't know what you've
got till it's gone
>This whitepaper looks at the value of email and outlines the issues and concerns of IT Managers involved in managing and maintaining business critical emails systems.
Now part of Symantec>CONTENTS
Introduction >P1 A day in the life of an email manager >p1 Business value of email >p2 Email problems >P3 Business case >P4 Sleep easy >P6 About MessageLabs Email Continuity Service >P6 About MessageLabs, now part of symantec >P6 >Introduction
Joni Mitchell once sang, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone." The same is true of email. When it works, nobody thinks about it. When it goes wrong, people sit up and take notice.
James looks after email in a mid-market firm of lawyers. With several offices, hundreds of staff and dozens of email servers, it's a full-time job with a lot of stress. Email looks simple to users but it's no cakewalk for An hour's the people who make it work. "It's like swans on the lake," says James. "I'm serene on the surface but underneath I'm paddling like crazy." email downtime a month >A day in the life of an email manager represents What keeps James awake at night? Part of the answer, of course, is a significant keeping the flow of email clear of viruses and spam so that people can spend more time on their work. Staying ahead of the internet criminals is cost to the a big challenge - you have to be lucky all the time, but they only have to business. be lucky once.
He also worries about how to ensure that all the company's email is fully and securely archived. IT managers are increasingly conscious of the risk of data loss and the burden of complying with regulations. It's easy to think of email as a company's nervous system but it is also increasingly a company's institutional memory. It's important to know who said what and when.
Another challenge - routine maintenance - seems surprisingly mundane until you consider the consequences. "We run Microsoft Exchange Server, which needs a lot of care and feeding." James works constantly to keep the system patched and up to date. Unplanned outages can cause huge disruption. Even an hour's downtime a month, multiplied by hundreds of people, represents a significant cost to the business.
If a minor outage turned into a disaster - a flood or fire, for example - and email was unavailable for days, it could be a business catastrophe. James asked himself how long his company could continue to trade without access to email. The answer is measured in hours, not days.
Surveying the problems and looking at the racks of expensive hardware in the server room, James knew there had to be a smarter alternative.
1>Business value of email
Do you remember sending your first email? For almost everyone, it is a recent, living memory. Yet, in the two decades since the first companies got onto the internet, it has become a fundamental part of business.
1People send tens of billions of emails every day according to research by UC Berkeley. The Radicati Group, a firm of analysts, estimates that there 2were 1.2 billion email users worldwide in October 2007 with 516 million Because email business email inboxes. On average, survey respondents sent 38 email messages per day and received 93 email messages per day. Of those 93, is ubiquitous, 3an average of 18 emails included an attachment. necessary and The statistics reflect our own intuitive experience. Imagine how difficult convenient, life would be without email. Think about how many emails you get every it cannot be day. Imagine if you had to replace each one with a meeting or phone call.
allowed to fail. It is so commonplace that it's easy to forget the benefits of email. They include:
Collaboration: Email is a one-to-many medium. It makes it easier to coordinate teams and reach consensus. People use their inbox as an aide-memoire and document store.
Communication: Unlike a meeting, a phone call or instant messaging, email is asynchronous. You can respond when you're ready. You can time-shift communication to suit your schedule.
Coordination: Arranging meetings and projects is much easier by email than by phone. Tools such as meeting invitations make it even easier.
Common carrier: Email is universal. You can send an email to virtual... [download for more]