By Matt Smith
With an abnormally aggressive hurricane season predicted, email continuity and disaster recovery are now top of mind for many storage managers. According to a recent Osterman Research survey of IT managers and email end users, the average employee sends and receives nearly 135 emails per day, which translates into either sending or receiving a message every 3.4 minutes in an 8-hour work day. By this calculation, an employee that goes just 60 minutes without email stands to miss out on nearly 20 messages. This business-critical reliance translates into added pressure for storage managers, who are tasked with a myriad of job duties outside of message storage management and continuity.
In preparing email stores for a disaster, there are several basic questions that can help a storage manager determine the best path. First, have provisions for loss of email communications already been included in the company’s disaster plan? If so, what is the plan for communicating with employees to advise them of a system outage? Keep in mind that email and phone access may be lost altogether so unless you have an existing plan in place, it will be difficult to communicate with anyone once the disaster has occurred. If these questions haven’t been addressed yet, the best strategy is to find the answers as soon as possible.
Next, the disaster plan task list points to the recovery plan for lost emails. Is your organization’s bottom line able to handle the permanent loss of some messages? Or has the C-level management asked for some level of assurance from the IT department that every message be recovered at some point and regardless of cost? Research in this area suggests that senior management has very little to no tolerance for the permanent loss of message data. Plus, with the new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) already in place, your organization’s inability to produce emails requested in a federal court case could result in the dismissal of the case or possible sanctions.
Today, permanent loss of email data is absolutely unacceptable for most organizations, which means that a cost estimate for data recovery and restoration should be included in the disaster plan. In addition, it is important to include calculations on exactly how long your organization can afford to be without access to email – both by the hour and by the day. Especially in cases where tape backup is being used, organizations cite recovery times ranging from one to five days and often times even longer, with costs soaring into the tens of thousands of dollars.
For many storage managers, backing up data at disparate geographic locations may not be in the budget, which means that if disaster strikes, the organization’s entire network will likely be affected. One fact is clear - no amount of disaster or continuity planning can guarantee network reliability in the event of a catastrophic natural disaster. As a result, an increasing number of firms are turning to software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, such as LiveOffice, for cost effective message management services, including backup and continuity.
Gaining more and more acceptance among storage managers, SaaS continuity services provide peace of mind at a cost effective price. Since the reputable vendors have multiple Tier 1 data centers in disparate geographic locations; data is immediately protected from regionally-confined disasters because it is duplicated and stored in multiple locations. In addition, vendors such as LiveOffice offer web-based email access to subscribers as a critical part of their continuity plan. With services such as these, the IT department, C-level management and all employees have instantaneous, continuous and secure access to their email using any Internet-connected PC in any location. Even if Internet access in the immediate area is lost, everyone is still able to rest easy knowing that their email data is being backed up in a secondary location, ensuring that no email messages are permanently lost.
In this new era where email is considered business-critical, many storage managers are starting to view SaaS message management services as an insurance policy for their storage infrastructure, ensuing data integrity and access at all times, regardless of the status of the in-house mail servers. Not to mention the added benefit of no longer having to manage mailbox quotas since data can now be stored offline, but remain accessible via personal mailbox management features offered by many message management service providers.
In many cases, the good SaaS email continuity providers also offer an entire suite of value-added services that help with the management of email and instant messaging (IM). The goal of these vendors is to provide clients with end-to-end message management - from continuity to encryption and policy management features. Combining all of these services into one application suite relieves storage managers of the tedious tasks associated with message management, making it the responsibility of the vendor and enabling storage managers to focus on higher priority, revenue-generating projects. Some of the most commonly offered value-add services include:
- Email & IM archiving – For many organizations, message archiving is a new IT priority due to the recent FRCP amendments, which mandate that emails and IMs be recoverable in a timely manner. The archiving solution selected should be able to index all messages in a secure digital archive so that they are easily searchable.
- e-Discovery – Similar to the archiving requirements many organizations are facing, they also need tools that will help them quickly search and retrieve electronic messages in the event of an internal audit or litigation request. e-Discovery technology can be thought of as providing the ability to find “the needle in the email haystack†and should operate seamlessly with the digital archiving service selected.
- Message security – The best way to protect the organization’s network from messaging threats is to ensure they never even reach the gateway. Opting for managed anti-spam and anti-virus protection ensures that the organization is protected at all times. In addition, some organizations are now requiring that emails containing sensitive information be encrypted, a service that many SaaS message vendors now provide.
- Compliance and policy management – Organizations in regulated industries must meet specific mandates regarding how emails and IMs are monitored; many vendors now provide compliance and policy management features that enable organizations to select how they want to monitor messages and to create automated proof-of-policy reports to demonstrate compliance with internal and external regulatory requirements.
- Customized client portal access – Many storage managers want to remain in control of message management, even if they are outsourcing it. The good vendors offer a web-based administration console that enables complete management of the service via a web-based interface. With this type of interface, approved personnel have point-and-click access to create, remove or inactivate email accounts and monitor usage levels by account. In addition, for organizations that want to manage their own spam and virus filters the Portal provides instant access to a threat management dashboard, where threat levels can be monitored and the appropriate action determined.
Being proactive with disaster recovery and email continuity plans can often yield business benefits beyond the obvious. Many organizations today are realizing that selecting the right vendor to assist with message continuity is one of the best moves they can make to ensure that business-critical emails are always accessible and recoverable. The good vendors will view the relationship as a partnership, working hand-in-hand with the storage manager to make sure that the organization’s changing messaging needs are constantly being met with the right technology.
Matt Smith is president of LiveOffice.
www.liveoffice.com