Disaster Recovery for your Email System
Think of how important your email system is to you and your organization. What would happen if this system were to go down? Your email system, or Enterprise Messaging, is one of the most important systems for your company’s bottom line. Your employees use your email system to communicate with your customers, partners, contractors, and many others. What would you do? How would your organization function? You need to have a disaster recovery plan! You need to ensure that you have a plan in place to keep your email system up and running. This plan must detail what would happen in the event of any system failure, whether that is because of a natural disaster, a hardware failure, power outages, or any other reason that your email system may go down.
How Much Would an Email Outage Could Cost You?
The cost of an email outage will vary from company to company, however, here is one example of what an outage could cost you and your company. Let’s say that your company has 250 users on your email system. If your average employee’s cost is $30/hour, and your email system is down for 60 minutes, that will costs you $7,500 in lost wages for all 250 users. This doesn’t even take into consideration the potential money that could be lost if a lead is missed or a sale could have been closed during that time, not to mention the reputation damage possible if your customers cannot get in contact with you.
Not only is downtime expensive, but according to a Cost of Data Center Outages study the cost to manage downtime for your business is 38% more per incident than it cost in 2010. On a macro level, downtime has cost US businesses an estimated cost of $700 billion in 2016. A 2013 update to the same study confirmed that downtime costs continued to rise as more businesses moved their services and databases online. By last year, downtime cost Fortune 1000 companies between $1.25 billion and $2.5 billion in estimated business losses.
So, in other words, you need to have a good disaster recovery plan!
Your Email Disaster Recovery Plan
There are a number of items that you must consider when it comes to disaster recovery. For email disaster recovery, let’s focus on two critical aspects:
- Restoration of the ability to send and receive mail.
- Recovery of recent mail.
If your email system goes down, you need to be able to get that system up and running as soon as possible. The key is that you have a system in place to failover to, in case your live system goes down. You cannot afford to have your email system be down, even if it is for just a few minutes.
Micro Focus offers an integrated disaster recovery solution as part of the Enterprise Messaging product to ensure that your email system is always up and running. This solution acts as a failover, so that if your live Enterprise Messaging email system goes down, you can have an offsite, or cloud disaster recovery system that can serve as your email system. The disaster recovery part of Enterprise Messaging can act as a live email system for up to two weeks, giving you time to get your live system back up and running. This feature provides your company an immediate failover with just the push of a button, meaning that failover is done with just one click of your mouse. This solution is ideal for disaster recovery, to ensure your business can continue to send and receive email!
The other aspect of your email disaster recovery plan is the recovery of recent email. When your email system goes down, recent email may not be backed up. And your email servers will continue to have email that is trying to get through. You need to have a solution to recover those emails. Once again, email is a mission critical aspect of your company, you cannot afford to lose a single email. Micro Focus Enterprise Messaging Disaster Recovery can not only serve as a failover, but with hot backups of the email system, it can restore any recent email that may have been lost during a disaster or other email system failure.
A Case Study in Effective Disaster Recovery
One organization, Stanley Tee was suitably prepared for a disaster. Stanley Tee had a water pipe burst and although it was some distance from the server room, the constant flow of water found its way through ducting and flat roof voids, eventually emerging right above the main servers, where it dripped into the SAN and Blade Centre – causing the SAN where this company’s GroupWise email system was hosted to become unusable. This is Stanley Tee should have experienced an email outage, but thanks to Micro Focus Enterprise Messaging Disaster Recovery, they were protected.
“There was no down time of the email system to users. We lost not one, single email,” explains Ken Lowe, head of IT.
“Like most businesses, email is crucial to us. It is our main source of communication with our customers. Failure to respond to an email within certain timeframes could mean a complaint against one of our solicitors, or a negligence claim against the firm,” states Ken Lowe, IT Head for Stanley Tee. However, this company had implemented GroupWise Disaster Recovery (part of the Micro Focus Enterprise Messaging solution) to ensure failover in case of an outage. “There was no down time of the email system to users. We lost not one, single email,” explains Ken Lowe. “The flood was a period of huge stress and incredibly long hours, but we came through completely intact. The only time we ever really thought about email was when people remarked, ‘Can you imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t installed GroupWise DR’” Stanley Tee was able to run their GroupWise email system on the Disaster Recovery solution until their equipment could be replaced. Then, because this solution features real-time backups, the organization was able to restore all email back to the live system.
The Solution for Email Disaster Recovery
Micro Focus Enterprise Messaging includes Disaster Recovery as part of its product offering. This solution ensures that your messaging system is always ready to go. Enterprise Messaging delivers quick message restoration as well as hot backups of email post offices and domains, ensuring that critical data is always current and available. Your backup also doubles as a failover system, in case your live messaging system goes down.
Learn more about Enterprise Messaging Disaster Recovery here
View this webinar recording to see the solution in action:
