Step one in business continuity: Protect Your Email

Step one in business continuity: Protect Your Email

When some part of your network fails such as a server or your broadband connection, the first and perhaps most significant impact to any business is normally your email. A few minutes without email may be manageable but what about a few hours or a few days?

Email has undeniably becomean integral part of most businesses, representing a critical form of business communication. However so many people continue to leave themselves vulnerable to expensive downtime and server failures. By not implementing a back-up alternative for your email you are accepting that it is fine for your business business to be totally cut off from receiving and sending email which means ignoring potential customers, suppliers, fellow staff, current clients and so on which isn't always the best way to present your business communication skills to the world.

Staff can't work because their emails are down? No more excuses thanks

It is perfectly legit for staff to claim that their ability to work is severely limited and in some cases completely halted because they cannot access their email accounts. This is often the case as offices around the world, whether in huge corporations or small businesses rely increasingly on electronic communications, namely email. People save important information and reminders within their email and often the only place that they have a particular contact's details saved is within an email or worse again the only details you have for a contact is their email address on the from' line of the last email you received from them.

So in order to turn such justifiable reasons for not working during downtime into cop out excuses that will not be accepted, it is imperative that smart business owners have asolution in place to ensure that staff will always receive theiremail regardless of server failures and planned or unplanned downtime. By protecting your staffs email you can simultaneously protect your office's productivity and your organisation's reputation as dependable, professional and contactable, in the eyes of partners, potential clients and the outside world in general.

Downtime cannot be perfectly calculated and yes itcosts money!

Making work emailalways available and fully functional is a smart and some would say essential move in organisations of all sizes. Like most things in life we take the availability of our email for granted. It's just expected to be there and working but unfortunately it's far from being that reliable.

According to Dunn & Bradstreet, 59% of Fortune 500 companies experience a minimum of 1.6 hours of downtime per week.

The problem is that many business owners wrongly assume that they may have some level of control over such downtime, that it will resonate from internal technologies and so their IT manager or outsourced providers will either know when it's going off or be able to fix it immediately if it's unplanned. Unfortunately ITs a little more fickle than that and downtime rarely keeps to a schedule, plus short of your IT department being manned by superheroes I think it's fair to say that extended periods of downtime cannot be avoided at times. Then think of the costs

You have to be realistic and think of the extended scenarios that have the potential to take your business down. The threats to your business could include both natural events as well as man-made events, what the IT Director refers to as "weather and wires."

So if you were to lose your email for the rest of today what would that mean for you?

The answer's pretty grim isn't it? Ok it might not force the company to close but just think of how much your workload would increase with every hour that passes. Or the cost of missing out on that deal you've worked hard for because you didn't get the email requesting pricing or additional info. Plus one can only imagine the reputation that can be ruined by failing to turn up to that big meeting that you missed because the details where inside and email that either you couldn't access or never received

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