Survey reveals widespread vulnerability to email outages

An ApplicationContinuity.org survey, analyzed and compiled by ResearchCorp.org, indicates 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: by trusting their messaging infrastructure to a single server; by not having a high availability solution to provide continuity in the event of a local server or technology failure; or by not having a disaster recovery plan in place.

The study, conducted online by ApplicationContinuity.org and sponsored by Teneros, Inc., surveyed 434 IT professionals responsible for email continuity in small (0-99), medium (100-999), and large (1000+) enterprises. The goal was to determine whether companies are prepared to deliver email continuity, particularly for Microsoft Exchange, and whether companies have a plan in place to secure email communication during a local or site-wide failure or downtime event.

The survey group includes a wide range of industry verticals, with financial services, high tech and manufacturing accounting for the top three represented. Ninety-seven percent of respondents are based in the United States, and 60 percent use Microsoft Exchange, confirming Microsoft's market leadership position in the corporate email market.

Key findings:

- 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.
- 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 survey also looks at migration plans for Exchange 2007, as well as industry-specific requirements for compliance or legal discovery solutions.

"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," said Craig Stouffer of ResearchCorp.org. "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."

•Date: 25th January 2008• Region:US/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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