Survey reveals widespread vulnerability to email outages

A new survey reveals that despite advances in the use of data backup, archiving, and protection technology, companies of all sizes remain vulnerable to costly and damaging email outages.

Key findings include:

Less than half of the respondents have a reactive disaster recovery plan in place.

-- Only 46 percent of respondents have currently implemented a high-availability solution of some type, and the definition varies widely to include data backup solutions that do not deliver high availability of business-critical applications such as email.

-- Only 21 percent of respondents have implemented a disaster avoidance strategy.

“Companies clearly recognize the mission-criticality of email, with 95% of surveyed companies viewing it as essential to business operations.

Eric Burgener, senior analyst with The Taneja Group

-- Twenty-nine percent of mid-sized companies are operating with only a single Exchange server, and have no application continuity plan in place.

-- More than 50 percent of the responding companies that have a continuity solution in place for Exchange are only backing up files or file systems and are not backing up the Exchange application for an immediate recovery in the event of a server failure or site outage.

The study was conducted online by ApplicationContinuity.org and sponsored by Teneros

Craig Stouffer of ResearchCorp.org, commented: "Given the excellent messaging continuity solutions that have emerged in the past few years, it's alarming to see how many companies still aren't proactively implementing the right mix of technologies to keep their email systems up and running around the clock. Whether this is a budget issue or an awareness issue is unclear, but for many companies the hard truth is that much more could -- and should -- be done to protect them from experiencing the devastating effects that email downtime can have on their bottom line."

Eric Burgener, senior analyst with The Taneja Group, added: "Companies clearly recognize the mission-criticality of email, with 95% of surveyed companies viewing it as essential to business operations. Additional survey findings on cost, impact, and frequency of email outages underline strongly that email is a system where proactive disaster avoidance, rather than just disaster recovery, will pay high dividends."