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Businesses Depend on Exchange
Although there are many e-mail platforms available, Microsoft Exchange is by far the most dominate with a commanding 65-percent share of the overall market (Ferris Research, 2008). The market dominance of Exchange is demonstrated even further within particular industries, such as health care, where the share total is closer to 90-percent. Microsoft Exchange has been around for over 11 years and is now in its eighth iteration. Since its debut over a decade ago, there have been vast advances in software and hardware technology.
During this period, Microsoft has taken full advantage of these, evolving Exchange into an enterprise-class messaging platform with particular emphasis placed on ease-of-use for end users and administrators (deployment and management). Furthermore, Exchange is highly scalable, available and reliable, as a result of years of testing and refinement. As a result of Exchange’s ubiquity in messaging, those companies that stray from its implementation usually hear complaints from end users for a variety of reasons, most notably the fact that other systems do not seamlessly inter-operate with Exchange’s formatting functionality or scheduling features, to name a few. Therefore, implementing Exchange has become a competitive requirement, to keep pace with the dynamic business community.
When Will Disaster Strike?
As a platform for business communication, Exchange requires the coordination of several variables in order to function in a normal state. These include hardware (servers, storage), software (operating systems, domain controllers), connectivity (LAN/WAN), and environmental controls (HVAC, power). A disruption in any one of these variables can often lead to a failure in another, ranging from simple application errors to complete system outage. Add to the list an ever-present stream of software patches to the O/S and other applications, as well as human error, and the probability of an unplanned Exchange disruption becomes almost certain within a calendar year.
Due to the complexity of Exchange environments, outages can be minimal, affecting only a few mailboxes; or, they can be substantial, bringing entire systems offline. Despite the fact that most organizations maintain service level agreements and outage recovery plans, few are able to prevent all outages; and, when they do occur, the recovery window often exceeds even the most conservative planning. When you consider e-mail as a mission critical service, it is obvious that the application and the components supporting the services are therefore mission critical.
It’s all or nothing. One weak link in an environment can cause frequent outages.
The Problem with Traditional Backups
So what does it take to protect a mission critical application such as Microsoft Exchange? There are a number of solutions on the market that provide some sort of support for maintaining Exchange’s uptime. Most solutions focus on one primary aspect of Exchange, the data. Without data, inboxes would be empty. So, it is understandable that most products for protecting the integrity of an Exchange server focus on protecting the data. After all, for legal reasons, we need to protect this data carefully to comply with various regulations, both internal and external. There are Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and many other audit and compliance idle and productivity grinds to a halt. Does your backup plan take the entire Exchange environment into consideration? Probably not. Most don’t.
Research shows that most backup and recovery plans don’t account for a recovery window that includes restoring entire environments. Whatever the reason for this omission, it is simply not acceptable. If an outage cannot be avoided altogether, than the recovery window must be made the shortest possible. How can a business reduce the recovery window? The answer lies in Continuous Application Protection, or CAP.
Continuous Application Protection (CAP)
CAP is technology that protects all components of an application environment (not just the data), including the operating system, the application binaries, registry settings, domain settings, application configurations and of requirements for archiving and protecting e-mail.
These products work well at moving data off the Exchange server and onto a backup system (such as a SAN, magnetic tape or remote host). But how does backing up data and off-loading it to another medium help maintain business continuity when the Exchange server is knocked offline due to any number of failure points previously discussed? It doesn’t.
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