Maintaining Email Continuity is Vital

Electronic mail or e-mail/email is a method of exchanging digital messages, which consists of content, an author address and one or

more recipient addresses.

Email is absolutely critical to the organizations of all sizes as it is the primary way though which individuals communicate and users

can send files to others inside and outside their organization.

At present, various organizations use email as the backbone for transaction processing, order processing, customer relationship

management, and other mission critical processes. Therefore, email use will continues to grow and will also remain the dominant

form of corporate communication in future.

Benefits

Primary Communications Tool: At present, majority of email users rely more on email than on any other communication modes they

use like telephone, instant messaging, face-to-face meetings, faxes, etc. Because corporate email is used at all times, during normal

business hours, when employees are at home, or by employees in multiple time zones, email must remain continually available.

Cost: E-mail provides a way to exchange information between two or more people with no set-up costs and that is generally far less

expensive than physical meetings or phone calls.

Synchronization: E-mail allows asynchrony that is each participant will decide its own, when and how much time he will spend

dealing with any associated information.

The De Facto File Transport System: While some organizations maintain FTP systems that are designed to handle file transfers, but

the vast majority of users take advantage of email’s ubiquity and ease of use to send documents, spreadsheets, presentations and

other content.

Problems

Information overload: E-mail is a push technology that is convenient availability of mailing lists and use of copy all can lead to people

receiving unwanted or irrelevant information of no use to them for example spam, also known as junk e-mail that involves nearly

identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail.

Inconsistency: E-mails can duplicate information, which is a problem when a large team is working on documents and information

while not in constant contact with the other members of their team.


Despite these disadvantages, e-mail has become the most widely used medium of communication within the business world. The

reasons for that are
• It is ubiquitous in the workplace, at home and on mobile platforms.
• Virtually all email systems can communicate with each other.
• It is already present and does not require a new system to be deployed.
• It requires little training, relieving the burden on IT to deploy new systems.

Email Systems go down
According to the recent survey by Osterman Research firm, it is found that in mid-sized and large organizations, email systems

experience a mean of 53 minutes of unplanned downtime in a month, that means that during a one-year period, it will be down for

10.6 hours. This does not include the scheduled maintenance or other scheduled outages that happen on a regular basis.

Email Downtime
The consequences of downtime can be serious and dramatic, which includes:
• Loss employee productivity
• Lost revenue
• Intangible and unidentifiable consequences

Why Email Must Operate 24x7?
Microsoft Exchange is the dominant email platform used in the corporate world with an estimated 48% of the North American installed

base in 2008, and will grow to 51% by 2010. However, despite the dominance of Exchange and its many robust features, it does not

have continuity inherently built-in.

The end users store documents through the Microsoft Exchange every day. Losing access to these documents could mean a loss in

revenue for the company and productivity loss for individual users.

Email is absolutely vital to the operation of most organizations and for the productivity of users who rely on email to get their work

done. It means that email must remain up and running as close to 24x7 as possible.