Email Archiving for Business Continuity

Much mileage is made from the legal aspects of email compliance and the obligations of organizations.  While it is extremely important that these obligations are met in full, they aren't the only reasons to have a coherent backup system in place.

Over eighty percent of business communication is now done over email.  No matter what the type of business, it is critical to the effective running and operation of just about every organization.  Imagine if all of a sudden that ability was taken away.  That affect alone could cripple some businesses.  What them if not only did you lose the ability to send mail, but you lost everything stored on the mail server?  If the business wasn't in trouble before, it would be now.

Anything that wasn't backed up on each users machine would be lost.  Gigabytes of essential business information gone.  That information could be anything from simple order acknowledgements to contracts and financial information.  Any business person will know, that it would be at this time that you receive an e-discovery request or need something from the archive.

This scenario may appear a little extreme, but when an organizations email systems are not part of an email compliance solution, it is a very real possibility.  Anything from a power cut to server failure, to all out building damage can cause this.  Unless a business has a robust business continuity solution, it could all too easily become a reality.  There are many single points of failure in any IT infrastructure, and it cannot be protected from every eventuality.  By spreading risk, a business can decrease this probability of failure by a significant amount.

Even the market leader, Microsoft Exchange has only limited archiving ability, and a failure of the exchange server would take out both email processing and email archiving.

One way round this is through diverse locations of It infrastructure.  If something happened to one site, the other would be able to take over.  This is an effective solution to many of the issues outline above.  But what about virus?  Or malicious users?  A diverse system will still be vulnerable to those types of problems. 

A hosted solution could be the most effective answer.  A secure system, at a secure location, with backups of backups to ensure business information is always available when needed.  Not only a secure location, protected from as many pitfalls as it is possible to protect from.  Limited user access and the latest anti-virus software running full time.  A coherent business continuity plan with immediate access from any location, anywhere in the world. 

In a hosted model, not only is there no hardware on site to go wrong, or be damaged, there is very little chance f anything being lost or going missing.  If a workplace was for whatever reason unusable, then email could be accessed from anywhere with internet access.  Impact to the business would be minimal, and staff could continue working and doing business.