Email is one of the most critical applications in use in business today: it is embedded in many business workflows, it is used by engineers to inform them of infrastructure issues and it is used to communicate with customers and business partners. In short, the modern organization has email at the heart of its communications and business processes. This makes it critical to minimize both the downtime and loss of email upon the outset of a business continuity event.
Maintaining email is no longer about keeping just the mail server itself online, organizations now employ email infrastructures containing multiple products to mitigate the risk of malware, spam, litigation and non-compliance.
Maintaining access to email while upholding risk mitigation and compliance is a challenging endeavor, this white paper discusses the issues involved with addressing this problem.
A MIMECAST SPONSORED WHITE PAPER
Email As Part of a Business Continuity StrategY
Why always-on-business requires always-on-email
Few businesses could function without email, and email provides a critical coordination tool during an outage, yet due to the cost and complexity of providing true email continuity many businesses do not have business continuity plans that protect email adequately. Continuity and archiving services may prove more cost effective for email than high-availability clustering, especially when considered in the light of continued governance, risk mitigation and compliance. CONTENTS
Audience and remit 2
Mimecast foreword 3
Executive summary 4
Business continuity planning and email 5
Availability, recovery and continuity 8
The human side of continuity 11
The business context of continuity 12
Cost, complexity and continuity 13
Achieving zero downtime 14
References 15
About Mimecast 15
Audience and remit
The intended audience for this White Paper includes those concerned with creating or implementing email management strategies, as well as managers with responsibility for business continuity processes. The paper looks at the general approaches available to ensure email continuity from a high level and the implications of deploying each strategy on infrastructure, budget, people and resilience.Mimecast Foreword
Email is one of the most critical applications in use in business today: it is embedded in many business workflows, it is used by engineers to inform them of infrastructure issues and it is used to communicate with customers and business partners. In short, the modern organization has email at the heart of its communications and business processes. This makes it critical to minimize both the downtime and loss of email upon the outset of a business continuity event.
Maintaining email is no longer about keeping just the mail server itself online, organizations now employ email infrastructures containing multiple products to mitigate the risk of malware, spam, litigation and non-compliance.
Maintaining access to email while upholding risk mitigation and compliance is a challenging endeavor, this white paper discusses the issues involved with addressing this problem.
3Executive Summary
Email has become an integral part of business and it's crucial to include it in business continuity planning. It's inevitable that email systems will fail and the business can assess the risks and provision systems to avoid the costs of lengthy email outages.
But traditional approaches to availability and recovery may not offer adequate protection for email systems at an affordable price, especially as it is now often a legal obligation as well as a business necessity to ensure that no messages are lost. Indeed, email is particularly important during a disaster, when staff will need to keep in touch more urgently than usual; they will also be under more stress so providing a transparent and familiar system is key.
Invoking a business continuity plan is expensive and therefore reserved for significant disasters. To this end a service-based email continuity solution may well be the best approach for both reliability and cost. Having an email continuity solution that can be invoked at minimal cost and with minimal disruption provides the additional benefit of providing flexibility in the patching and upgrading of the email server.
4Business Continuity Planning and email
More mobile workers, more demanding If the mail system fails, the results range from customers, global competition, the increasing lost productivity to losing orders and customers; need for business agility, sheer convenience; from fines and litigation to business failure within 4there's a range of reasons why email has a surprisingly short period of time. Therefore become so important for modern business. making sure that email stays available is a key The vast majority of decision makers rate part of any business continuity plan. However email as a mission-critical business resource only a third of businesses would be able to for communicating and transferring files; continue using email without any interruption email remains the preferred business or data loss in the event of server failure. Nearly communications channel for 93% of enterprise as m... [download for more]
