For want of an email...an enterprise was lost

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 10 February 2009 05:58

IT Industry - Market

A global survey has found many enterprises very vulnerable to loss of email services.
The survey, of 220 IT managers and directors at mid-size companies worldwide, found that 34 percent would potentially damage their company or customer relationships, 25 percent would experience a significant loss in employee productivity during e-mail downtime, 19 percent would lose revenue and six percent would be unable to maintain regulatory compliance.

Overall, 74 percent of respondents indicated that their organisations' tolerance for downtime was one hour or less. Just under 24 percent said downtime of up to four hours would be tolerated while none of the respondents could tolerate 12 hours or more.

The study, conducted by Neverfail, found email to be the critical lifeline for businesses, no matter the size, geographic location or industry. One legal firm reported: "The ability to communicate via email is crucial to the progression of litigation work. When email is down for more than one hour this can impact on that work and can even result in difficulties with court dates."

Another said "We are a public organisation that serves at-risk individuals – downtime could be an embarrassment for the government and would likely attract large media attention." A third said: "We are a port and our customers rely on our ability to provide accurate, up-to-date information on all containers / products being imported / exported."

"Yet, despite these potential consequences, companies often overlook the need to deploy a business continuity solution that is both cost-effective and easy-to-manage," Neverfail claimed. While this might have been a question asked of its respondents it provided no information on their answers.

But it should come as no surprise that this is exactly what Neverfail offers. It claims to be "a leading global software company providing continuous availability and disaster recovery for critical Windows-based applications in physical, virtual or mixed environments."

Its "predictive approach protects businesses during both IT outages and planned maintenance," and "Regardless of the type of problem, from a single component failure to a full site disaster, critical business applications remain constantly available to information workers."