Why Email Continuity Matters Contents What is Email Continuity and Why it Matters........................... 1 Challenges to Email Continuity................................... 2 Increasing Email Management Complexity............................ 3 The Risks of Email Outages.................................... 3 Continuity for Unplanned Outages................................ 4 Continuity for Microsoft Maintenance and Planned Outages................ 4 Email Continuity Solutions..................................... 4 Brought to you compliments of: Email continuity is more than disaster recovery, and it s more than backup. Continuity for businesses means that employees can access critical systems such as email at all times during server outages, maintenance or data center failures. Email is so essential to business today that it needs to be continuously accessible. Unfortunately, it has become a tool that s complex to manage, often overwhelming IT teams during outages or even planned downtime. This paper explains what email continuity is and how it can be achieved. What is Email Continuity and Why it Matters Email continuity is a simple concept: It means that email remains available for users always. They should have access to their email at work, on their phone and through any Internet browser whenever necessary. But that continuity goal can be elusive for many businesses trying to balance users needs with their budgets and IT resources. 2011 Mimecast
Because email is essential to business, ensuring continuous access to it is more critical than ever. Employees use email tools constantly, whether remotely from mobile devices or in the office or at home from desktop computers. A recent Mimecast Exchange Infrastructure Survey found that email is the preferred means of communication at work for two-thirds of respondents. 1 And email tools are more sophisticated, robust and well integrated than ever. If there is a system outage, users lose the flexibility they need to communicate effectively. Even a short downtime can mean missed revenue opportunities, slow response to customer inquiries and an overall slowdown in decision-making abilities. Email is now one of the systems that organizations cannot function without. In another survey, an overwhelming majority 86 percent of respondents said they consider it essential in their work that email is problem-free. 2 For IT organizations, however, email continuity presents a number of challenges. For one, mobile email access has become crucial for workers, adding to support demands. Email systems are also accumulating large amounts of data and consuming server space rapidly. To resolve server space and performance issues, most companies have deployed archives, which employees need to access, adding another infrastructure requirement. And performance matters: Whether it s for in-house email, webmail or mobile messaging, users need fast access and search speeds to current and archived information. The fastest, most reliable backup recovery process is still too long when it comes to email. For many organizations, the recovery process could mean hours, if not days, spent retrieving files from deep storage, including off-site locations or tape. And backup retrieval consumes significant amounts of time for IT and is frustrating for users. Depending on the media and location, email recovery from backups can also produce inaccurate results, adding even more lost time and productivity. Even with regularly scheduled maintenance and upgrades, unplanned email downtime can happen. Microsoft Exchange users are dealing with 2.5 hours of email outages a month, according to a Radicati Group survey. 3 Such outages can be extremely costly: Osterman Research data shows that just a half-hour of unplanned email downtime per month can result in more than $26,000 in annual costs for midsize organizations. 4 Downtime costs can include damage to the company s reputation, revenue loss and decreased productivity. Challenges to Email Continuity Though continuity is clearly crucial for email infrastructure, businesses don t always know what they must do to achieve it. Email management in a complex IT environment means that organizations must continually evolve to maintain control over their dynamic email infrastructures. Email management can easily become overwhelming, especially during a disaster or unexpected outage, when other systems are vying for attention. In addition, many businesses are managing several different email access devices, adding complexity in the form of more management consoles and integration requirements. 1 Mimecast Exchange Infrastructure Survey, November 2010 2 3 Radicati Group survey, December 2010, http://www.radicati.com/?p=6161 or http://www.radicati.com/?p=6653 4 Osterman Research, December 2010, http://ostermanresearch.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/the-critical-need-for-email-continuity/ 2 2011 Mimecast
Increasing Email Management Complexity What started as a simple messaging program has grown into a cornerstone of organizations IT infrastructures. Email helps companies communicate quickly and efficiently. However, for IT, it has become more complex and often consumes a growing amount of server and storage space. Another concern is that emails have grown in size as more users attach large files and use rich text formats in their messages. Large files, along with the need for remote and mobile access and other factors, have made email management that much more of a complicated proposition. For many organizations, archiving requirements add to the complexity. Companies often need to save emails for regulatory or legal purposes, such as HIPAA compliance or e-discovery requests. Another reason for long-term archiving: archived emails and attachments contain years worth of internal knowledge and intellectual property. Users must be able to access current and past email, and they must be able to do it quickly. IT teams are always working to manage mailbox sizes and limits in an efficient way that reduces administrative time while satisfying user, help desk and archiving requirements. A recent survey found that more than half of the respondents (56 percent) had some frustrations related to their work mailboxes. Thirty-nine percent were especially concerned about keeping mailbox contents within limits, though surprisingly, 80 percent didn t know what their mailbox limit was. 5 Another challenge is security. Spam, viruses and other threats are major obstacles to email continuity, especially as threats grow more sophisticated and recurrent. Keeping out security threats, while allowing legitimate emails through, is a constant balancing act. One infected email can bring the whole system down, but overly restrictive email rules can mean users miss crucial legitimate emails. All of these requirements reduce the effectiveness and flexibility of server utilization and storage, and add to the annual technology budget. On-site email management products can be expensive, however, and are often a significant portion of the IT budget. The Risks of Email Outages Some applications experience occasional outages or downtime, and employees are able to adjust their productivity accordingly. Email isn t one of them. Its time-sensitive nature means that Microsoft Outlook and other email programs must be continuously available. In today s business climate, users need 24/7 access to their email and archives from wherever they are, even when there is an outage. A growing threat to effective email management is the blurring of the line between work and personal email. In a recent survey, more than three quarters of the respondents (79 percent) said they send work-related emails or documents to or from personal email accounts. Most respondents (71 percent) said they know that poses a risk, but nearly half (47 percent) said they think it s acceptable to send work information to personal accounts. 6 Employees may resort to personal email accounts if they don t think they can depend on their work accounts for constant uptime. However, stopgap measures that allow emails and documents to leave corporate systems add an additional measure of vulnerability, opening up a company to theft and loss and reducing control over the email infrastructure. 5 6 3 2011 Mimecast
Corporate email policies are essential and can help cut down on email viruses, hoaxes, phishing, spam and other threats. Most policies require that employees use only their company email for transmitting work documents, but because business often can t wait, employees may violate the policy when corporate email becomes unavailable. Comprehensive email management and continuously available email makes it easier for users to comply with policies. It s not only possible to enforce the corporate email policy during a server outage, it s necessary for regulatory compliance. All of an organization s email and archive policies and requirements must remain in place during a disaster, for all mailboxes and email, to ensure that any current or future e-discovery needs or legal holds can be met. Continuity for Unplanned Outages It s a reality that unplanned outages happen, along with planned downtime for migrations, upgrades or maintenance. Data center problems, such as cooling or power failures, can have a sudden impact, along with hardware or software failures and natural disasters. Spam or malware can have unplanned effects, too. The planned recovery objectives in a service-level agreement (SLA) are often harder to meet when IT or a service provider is struggling to restore services for many units. Incomplete recovery or continuity planning and training can make an actual outage harder as well. Depending solely on in-house servers for email continuity can be risky even if there is a backup or recovery site, email will likely be down for much too long. Fully testing continuity plans is difficult for many organizations, so companies often do only partial testing or disaster planning. Creating and testing continuity plans takes up valuable time and can easily be delayed. A 2010 survey found that 33 percent of organizations don t regularly test their disaster recovery plans, and another 50 percent have only partially tested their plans. 7 Taking time out for planning and testing can be difficult for busy organizations especially if it means buying hardware or software to create a backup site. But recovering from an unplanned outage has even greater implications. Continuity planning isn t always easy, but it is imperative. Continuity for Microsoft Maintenance and Planned Outages Microsoft Exchange 2010 migrations are a hot topic for IT teams these days. A migration can be a major obstacle for email continuity, even though users and administrators look forward to functional improvements in the post-migration environment. The upgrade is a necessity, but the length of time involved has a serious impact on email users, especially if there are any unexpected delays. And any new software has the potential to cause unexpected wrinkles or installation delays. There are solutions specifically tailored to work with Microsoft email tools and automatically sync with Outlook, limiting migration risks. IT teams may also be considering integration with Microsoft s BPOS (soon to be Office 365) as companies move toward software-as-a-service email tools. Email Continuity Solutions Email continuity means that users will not see any lapse in service when the corporate email system switches over to the continuity provider. Always-on, cloud-based email systems such as 7 SearchStorage.com survey, June 2010, http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/magazinecontent/companies-are-better-prepared-for-disasters 4 2011 Mimecast
Mimecast s solution can ease headaches around email continuity. Mimecast provides automatic service failover and failback in near real time when an outage happens. When a company s Exchange email systems switch over to Mimecast, only IT administrators see that the change has happened. All users continue interacting with email as they usually do, with uninterrupted email access through all portals: Outlook, webmail and mobile devices. Migrating to Exchange in tandem with Mimecast is the ideal email continuity strategy. Mimecast takes over as the older version of Exchange is switched out, and keeps service running smoothly until the new software is installed, tested and restored to users. During outages and migration or maintenance downtime, corporate policies remain in place, as does access to email through corporate computers, webmail and mobile devices. Email remains secure, even across various data centers, and it is fully encrypted to keep information locked down and accountable for compliance purposes. A 100 percent uptime SLA means that the whole package is the insurance policy you need. Mimecast maintains a group of secure, geographically dispersed data centers, which makes 100 percent service availability possible. Each data center uses built-in safeguards to avoid device or media failures. Customers have put Mimecast to the test in many ways. For example, Mimecast customer Butterfield Bank found that its email was hurricane-proof. In 2007, the Cayman Islands business shut down its systems as Hurricane Dean approached the island, but email remained up throughout the whole storm especially important for client and staff communication during a natural disaster. At Basic Energy Services, the IT team supports remote users who face unpredictable conditions at the company s oil and gas wells across the southern and western United States. With its Mimecast implementation, Basic Energy Services has streamlined its email system, adding archiving, security, continuity, policy control and search. Another key feature for Mimecast customers is that archive access does not change, no matter what the situation is. Mimecast s independent, cloud-based approach is separate from affected systems and networks, so users have full access to their email messages and archived email during an outage. In addition, Mimecast s email continuity service uses a single console and promises users a 100 percent uptime SLA. For IT administrators, simplified email management saves time and reduces productivity loss. A recent survey of IT administrators found that 50 percent of respondents use two or more email solutions for archiving, continuity and security, and 20 percent manage three or more products. 8 Those numbers demonstrate that too many IT pros are juggling multiple consoles, systems and support requirements to provide the best email access they can for users. Email has become complex, but it doesn t have to be complicated to manage. Mimecast s solutions make email simpler and more manageable by combining all the features necessary to provide uninterrupted access. 8 Mimecast Exchange Infrastructure Survey, November 2010 5 2011 Mimecast