Unplanned email outages still accepted by business 13 August, 2007 By Chris Talbot

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Most businesses view e-mail as a mission-critical application these days, which is a big change from even just a few years ago, but despite the critical nature of e-mail, organizations still aren't proactively managing their e-mail and they're putting with, on average, 1.6 downtime periods a month, said Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development at The Neverfail Group, a company that provides continuous availability software for Exchange and Lotus platforms.

E-mail is a critical tool, as it's become an important line of internal and external communication, Barnes said. When e-mail goes down, it can only be a minor hassle, but it could also mean a negative impact on various elements of the business, including sales and customer service.

"We know that when lines of communication fail, all sorts of things go wrong," Barnes said. He added that Neverfail's objective is to make sure its customers' e-mail systems never goes down, which it does through software that enables seamless failover from the main e-mail server to a secondary server. In addition to providing software for Exchange and Lotus environments, Neverfail also provides the tools necessary to keep mobile e-mail for the RIM BlackBerry up and running all the time.

"A big part of what we provide is making sure that the mobile devices, such as BlackBerrys, are always connected to that e-mail service as well," Barnes said. Commissioned by Neverfail and conducted by Osterman Research, the survey titled "Planning for Improved E-mail Availability" is available at Neverfail's Web site.

One of the surprises of the survey was that although people recognize the importance of e-mail and the costs associated with e-mail outages, organizations are not proactively managing their e-mail systems, Barnes said. Often, IT doesn't even know the e-mail system is down until end-users start calling them with complaints -- and that can take a variable amount of time before end-users notice they're not receiving e-mail.

Barnes described that fact as a strange way of operating a mission-critical system.

"People should be proactive about managing their e-mail service," he said. While businesses are on average suffering 1.6 unscheduled outages a month, the amount of time the e-mail system is down varies considerably. Sometimes it's something simple that only knocks the e-mail system out for half an hour, but at other times, it's down for several hours, Barnes said.

"I think one of the reasons [organizations accept downtime] is because e-mail has been around for quite awhile now and because it's managed by IT, businesses have always looked at this as an IT problem," Barnes said.

However, there's a disconnect between acceptable levels of downtime. IT sees it one way. The business sees it differently.

"It's almost like this disconnect between what IT thinks is an acceptable level of service and what business requires," Barnes said, adding that in some cases, IT departments believe it's acceptable to be e-mail-less for four hours. When businesses rely on e-mail communication for their livelihoods, that four hours could be disastrous.

The impact on the business varies, though.

"I think it varies from the fairly mundane to the very serious," Barnes said. Downtime costs can be significant, though. According to 40 per cent of the people surveyed, they could lose up to $50,000 per major e-mail outage. Based on 1.6 downtime periods a month, and the dollars add up to nearly $1 million in lost revenue.

"The importance of availability of e-mail can't be overstressed, and the disconnect between that importance and the way IT thinks about e-mail today needs some discussion," Barnes said.