Teneros has revealed new research conducted on its behalf by King Research which indicates that, despite the clear and serious impact of e-mail downtime on productivity, most companies are not taking adequate action to prevent outages.

The new study surveyed 220 IT professionals responsible for messaging systems in mid-market companies. The goal was to gather data on the activities and products that IT teams are using to ensure messaging continuity, as well as to investigate key challenges faced by the individuals responsible for keeping their corporate e-mail up and running. Nearly 80 percent of respondents use Microsoft Exchange in their organization.

The research suggests that while most companies are clearly aware of the damage e-mail downtime can do, that knowledge has not yet translated into increased spending on technology and human resources to prevent downtime, hence, outages are still a reality.

* While nearly all (96 percent) respondents said that work stops and/or productivity is severely reduced during email outage events:
- More than eight out of 10 respondents who use Exchange (83 percent) have experienced an unplanned outage during the past year.
- Nearly eight out of 10 respondents overall (77 percent) said their companies haven't increased the number of IT personnel for handling maintenance.

* While more than three-quarters of respondents (76 percent) said their Exchange mailstore is increasing:

- Nearly half of all respondents (45 percent) said their organizations have no archiving software in place nor any plans to implement an archiving solution.
- Of the 55 percent of respondent companies with an archiving solution, (41 percent)use Symantec's Enterprise Vault.

The survey also revealed that employee demand for e-mail access around the clock is impacting the IT department's ability to manage it:

* When asked about the most challenging aspect of maintaining Exchange servers, 21 percent of respondents cited the lack of available maintenance windows (i.e. scheduled downtime) - even for brief periods of two hours or less per month.

* Another 20 percent phrased the same challenge in different words claiming the need for 24x7 e-mail uptime as their most difficult maintenance challenge.

A complete copy of the report is available at www.ApplicationContinuity.org

•Date: 3rd April 2007 • Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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