Email Continuity Challenges
Backup systems cost more than Exchange
Can’t afford a standby email system? It seems unreasonable to have to pay for a completely redundant email system and the added costs of operating dual systems when most companies only need backups a few days a year. EMS Email Continuity solves this problem with insurance-like pricing.
The costs associated with deploying and maintaining the EMS on-demand services are fully known upfront, requiring little or no initial investment, and have predictable monthly costs. Why pay for complex, redundant systems when a better solution is available maintenance free? Dell MessageOne™ on-demand services are priced like insurance and achieve the lowest total cost of ownership for the highest level of protection.
75% of companies will experience email failure
Outages happen, planned or unplanned. Seventy-five percent of companies will experience a major outage annually. Another 14 percent will experience a major planned outage due to testing or upgrades. As the importance of email has increased, the tolerance for outages has severely diminished. Yet 55 percent of outages last for six hours or more. How do you ensure that your users can continue to work when the odds hit and your system goes down?
Today’s best practices still leave gaps in coverage for primary email systems. With even the best replication, clustering or log shipping solutions, organizations are still vulnerable to downtime and data loss from database corruption, Active Directory® corruption, configuration errors, power/network downtime, viruses, and malware. To make the situation worse, these solutions are costly to implement, complex to manage, and often result in lost messages.
EMS Email Continuity™ service provides a standby email system that ensures your organization always has access to email without downtime or data loss… regardless of the state of your servers, software, infrastructure, or staff.
Users may find a way to keep working, but…
A recent Osterman Research survey found that when email is down 60% of employees use personal accounts for business transactions. With the recent changes in the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure (FRCP) email is discoverable and expected to be produced in common litigation. If your email goes down, are you still in compliance or will you lose email that you really ought to have available? The cost of not being able to comply with such a discovery request can easily outweigh the costs of a complete email continuity solution.
Email archiving is becoming a given. But often overlooked is the impact of email outages on the accuracy of archives and the costs associated with providing redundant disaster recovery and archiving systems. Both are fundamentally data stores of critical data; why not solve both needs with one system?
Combining EMS Email Continuity and Dell MessageOne Email Archiving Services you gain an integrated system that reduces costs, but more importantly, significantly reduces management complexity. Combining archiving and disaster recovery provides an accurate, tamper-proof, policy compliant archive without the costs and complexity of dueling retention policies, duplicate storage costs, and the administration costs of multiple high availability (HA) solutions for separate systems.
The archive is always available and compliance policies are always working, even if your primary email system, infrastructure, or staff are not. You really cannot solve your archiving needs without solving the disaster recovery and routine email outage problems.
Increasingly complex systems are increasingly complex to manage
The high-availability paradox: As attempts to provide bullet-proof on-site email service have become more complex, the difficulty of operating these systems has grown to the point where it causes the very outages that these systems were designed to prevent… and it is expensive.
The operation and maintenance requirements of complex on-premise systems can be substantial. With the need to manage patches, servers, licenses, storage capacity, memory indexes, user capacity, disaster recovery, high availability (HA) and complex backups on multiple, non-integrated solutions, staffing costs can outweigh all other system costs combined and human errors are as likely as hardware failures.
With EMS™ on-demand services, very little software or hardware is deployed on-site and the burden of maintaining the system is shifted to Dell MessageOne. Virtually infinite mailboxes are provided for any number of users and organizations can grow as needed.
Exchange 2007® doesn’t provide continuity
During an outage or failure, Exchange 2007 doesn’t provide any built-in continuity functionality. Failover technologies can be used to shift load between systems to shorten the duration of an outage, but this process is not invisible to users. For longer outages, Exchange doesn’t offer any built-in methods of providing alternate access to stored messages.
EMS Email Continuity provides continuous user access to email through Outlook® or a web browser and BlackBerry® mobile devices. EMS Email Continuity offers a guaranteed 60-second failover time and complete protection against any type of downtime that might affect Exchange; because EMS is a hosted service, localized failures of connectivity, infrastructure services, or Exchange can’t affect it. After an outage, EMS automatically moves all sent, received, and deleted email back to the primary system in one step, with all forensic information intact (including time/date stamps, BCC recipients, and read/unread status).
Exchange 2007’s new capabilities will help reduce risks, but still fall short of providing a complete solution for organizations that desire the following:
- Always-on and always-available email and archiving services
- Granular message retention policies with effortless management
- Easily executed, rapid search capabilities to find required messages for legal, HR, or compliance purposes
- Protection against the loss of BlackBerry device connectivity
- Total elimination of email data loss windows between nightly backups
- Control and minimization of the growing size of email data stores
Adding Dell MessageOne Email Management Service to Exchange 2007 is the lowest cost and most easily managed solution capable of addressing all of these needs.
