When email is down
When email is not available your business can easily grind to a halt.
Email downtime is a source of real aggravation, lost productivity, reputation risk, potential regulatory consequence and lost trade. Failures can result from software error, hardware failure, a storage problem, human error, a utility outage, a network problem, or a catastrophe such as a flood, fire or theft. Protecting the uptime of your email service and email data access is therefore a key responsibility of IT professionals.
Mimecast keeps users working during an outage
Delivering 100% email uptime to your business is now achievable by simply connecting your email server to the Mimecast Service. This means that your users can work uninterrupted in the event of any email outage.
Even in a catastrophic outage, Mimecast enables work to continue with:
- Access new incoming email that can't yet be delivered to your primary email servers
- Read, reply, forward from your personal email archive
- Create new messages
- Run rapid searches and access historic email (up to 10 years of data)
How does 'always on' email service work?
- During an email server outage, or network failure the Mimecast service automatically queues new email for Microsoft Exchange.
- Mimecast then delivers this email to a disaster recovery inbox that can easily be accessed by either webmail or through Outlook.
- Users then have access to new email before its delivery to the mail server.
- Once Exchange is back up and running, all queued email and any new email created during the outage is delivered to the mail server
Disaster considerations you should be thinking about
Disasters come in many forms and have severe impacts on your business. Planned events such as building power downs, system upgrades and office moves, even for a short time cause lost productivity and business.
Unplanned long term disasters require more than just being able to access historic email. What happens to customers and partners wanting to conduct business during a disaster?
What happens during an outage?
Your business may have a Disaster Recover plan in place to address outages. But have you considered the following procedures:
- Convening of a crisis committee to assess the extent of the problems
- Exploring various resolution scenarios before deciding on the most optimal
- Who needs to be notified? Employees? Customers? Partners?
- Do you have up to date contact details?
- What method will you use to notify these contacts?
- Can customers continue working with your business?
- How do you reverse your DR plans upon resolution?
