How Email Continuity Can Improve Productivity
Think of all the amount of correspondence contained in your daily email exchanges that you carry out at the office. It is how your employees communicate with your customers, schedule their meetings, keep calendars up to date, drive sales proposals through, answer client’s and colleague’s questions and much more. With so much precious information at stake, it is vital that your corporate email servers be backed up constantly – which has to go far beyond the server backup that guarantees continued use of email.
Most email users spend at least a quarter of every day reading or writing emails. They spend far less time on the telephone or engaged in face to face conversations or communicating on social media. It is a sad fact that at some point every email server will fail at some point. Around 26% of all organizations suffer downtime each and every month of at least 30 minutes.12% of organizations have outages of around two hours each and every month. Depending on the root cause of the failure, recovery takes anywhere between a couple of hours to 48 or 72 hours. Without an emergency system ready to fall back on all employees have no option but to do nothing until the system is sorted out.
When an email system fails users seek out other ways of communicating with clients. Sometimes using their personal email accounts. Often compromising the security of sensitive information. IT staff have no choice but to drop everything and sort out the email system while they are doing the stability and security of all your other systems is compromised. You do not receive incoming customer queries, so they do not get answered in time and may even be lost entirely.
True email continuity means the ability to utilise email within moments of its loss. Some systems are so automatic and transparent, users don’t even detect the failure when it happens – only the IT team notices the difference. A range of continuity options exist, all sharing the ability to send and receive messages, a way to store them outside the primary server and a way for users to access new messages as well as old ones. Importantly, email continuity systems should resemble the users’ primary email client to reduce confusion and helpdesk queries during the outage.
Compared to other disaster recovery applications (which are oftentimes expensive to maintain despite their low initial purchase cost), cloud-based is the fastest and easiest solution, by far. Cloud-based services have uptime of at least 99.99%. You do not have to install any hardware or download any software. Third-party management is included, which means your IT staff do not have to be involved in setting up or running the system. You also need no onsite storage, which reduces power demands too. Your employees enjoy uninterrupted access to stored messages, plus, constant connectivity via their mobile phones. Cloud-based services also offer seamless integration with cloud-based archiving, which many companies are using because it offers them unlimited storage.
A growing number of firms and organizations are moving to cloud-based email services because it costs less, is more reliable and easier to set up. Corporate email systems also get better virus and spam protection. They are also far easier to access, maintain and archive.
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