Email Continuity

WHITEPAPER
24 hours without email
would your business survive?
A whitepaper from symantec hosted services
www.messagelabs.com info@messagelabs.comWHITEPAPER
Introduction
24 hours is a long time to be without your email. If an email server goes down it can be a big problem; whether it is for a whole day or just a couple of hours a month over the course of a year. You lose crucial communications and productivity.
Take Leo Hanna, UK Sales Director at Symantec Hosted Services, as an example. Email is an essential part of his business life: from checking his BlackBerry over breakfast through reading up to 150 emails throughout the day and responding to colleagues in the US in the evening. He also depends on his email archive as a memory aid and filing cabinet.
"I can get an urgent opportunity that requires immediate attention," he says, "and that may happen at any time. Email going down is pretty painful." Problems escalate, colleagues go unanswered, deals aren't done, orders are lost, customers' problems remain unsolved. "If people email and don't reach me, they'll think I'm being remiss or worse by not responding in a timely fashion."
There are times, such as the end of the month or the end of the quarter, where even a short outage can have very serious consequences. These are the periods when most orders come in, so missing a few or not responding to an urgent question could push a critical deal into the next month or the next quarter. "People expect a turnaround time of hours if not minutes. That's a real worry," says Hanna.
Of course, as someone who works for Symantec Hosted Services, MessageLabs Email Continuity Service is always available to him and so these fears are unlikely to turn into reality, but there are millions of people who are not safe from email problems. That is the subject of this white paper.
www.messagelabs.com info@messagelabs.comWHITEPAPER
Email is like breathing; it's not optional
We all use email just as we all breathe. It feels like something that is just 'always there'. Until it's not. Sometimes it pays to stand back and really observe what's actually going on. Like a doctor with a stethoscope, IT managers can use their email server to get a snapshot of activity on their system: how many emails come in from outside, how many are sent, who sends internal emails, meeting requests etc. On a global scale, it's clear that email is the nervous system of modern business. There are 1.4 billion 1email users (including more than half a billion corporate accounts), according to The Radicati Group . They send 247 billion emails a day and the average corporate user deals with 167 email messages a day, 37 of which contain an attachment.
How email problems can break your business
Let's discuss some of the ways that email is part of everyday business, how much we depend on it and how a hiccup or problem with email can cause real business pain. Consider the following timeline, that shows how a day without email could potentially wreck your business:
Outage + 1 hour Productivity suffers as people start telephoning rather than emailing. If a colleague, a customer or a supplier has a problem, you need to solve it; either with a quick answer or by pooling expertise from several people. This needs email. Without it, you have to resort to phone calls. Fine, except that it is very disruptive and it can be hard to reach people. One of the great benefits of email is that it is asynchronous, meaning simply that people can read and reply to emails in their own time. Without this ability to collaborate asynchronously, your team is like an engine that is running low on oil.
+ 2 hours Customer service crashes. If you're in a services business and you have a personal relationship with your customers, you want to hear about their problems immediately. If they send you a question or ask you to solve a problem, the best way to hurt the relationship is to appear to ignore their message. Similarly, if you sell products or services to a wider audience, email is the main channel for problems. People will email you if your ecommerce server isn't available, if there's a problem in your shops or warehouses or if one of your products has a fault. Many companies use social networking sites and other online services to talk to customers, but without email you may not know what people are saying about you unless you ob... [download for more]