How IT Managers Avoid Mission-critical Email Server Outages

Few things give IT managers as many sleepless nights as the fear of a mission-critical system going down. And although many problems can be recovered relatively quickly, a failed email server could be disastrous. The downtime incurred restoring an Exchange message store (or similar) is hugely expensive – some reports suggest a single hour outage of a mission-critical system could cost as much as $9.99 million in some industries (IDC’s Business Value Research).

Most of the costs associated with an email server outage are as a direct result of lost productivity; employees cannot respond to client requests, leaving many customer-facing workers almost completely incapable of doing their jobs. Employees spend up to 1.75 hours every day using email– roughly a quarter of any given working day. If the server goes down and four employees can’t work, you lose a full working day. 40 employees left without email leaves you the equivalent of two working weeks behind.

Little surprise that the finance director leans so hard on the IT manager as soon as the email service goes down.

Not just lost productivity

Although the financial effects of a server outage may be felt for some time, there are also other outcomes that can have a massive impact. In an era when customers expect your business to be available around the clock, whenever they choose.

But an email server outage immediately shuts one of your communications channels, making it harder for customers to get in touch. And if they can’t get the answer they need, they will go to where they can – one of your competitors. Because according to research by Toister Solutions, most customers expect a response to their messages in less than hour.

Bounced emails also dent customer trust. Are emails failing to be delivered because of a temporary outage, or is there a more serious problem? Has your business gone bust? Your account managers will have to work overtime to reassure existing clients that there are no on-going problems, and that your business remains fully operational (even if the email server doesn’t).

Maintaining availability in an email server disaster

For most businesses, the cost of setting up multiple datacenters to provide failover provisions in the event of a localised server outage are prohibitive. And in reality, modern hosted architecture makes such provisions unnecessary.

Typically thought of as “just” an email malware scanner, Topsec’s BlockMail product also offers an email failover system, so that workers can continue to send and receive messages, even when the local server is down. Even more helpfully, BlockMail also stores every message sent and received by your organisation for the last 14 days – so your employees are able to refer back to their most recent communications, even if the mailstore is down.

For the IT manager, having a fully-managed, email fail-over helps improve availability and serviced availability for their employees.

Want to know more? Give the Topsec team a call today, and let us arrange a free trial so you can see BlockMail’s email availability tools in action. You might even sleep a little easier afterwards!