>EMAIL CONTINUITY

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’VE

GOT TILL IT’S GONE

>THIS WHITEPAPER LOOKS AT THE VALUE OF EMAIL

AND OUTLINES THE ISSUES AND CONCERNS OF IT
MANAGERS INVOLVED IN MANAGING AND MAINTAINING
BUSINESS CRITICAL EMAILS SYSTEMS.

Now part of Symantec

>CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION >P1
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN EMAIL MANAGER >P1
BUSINESS VALUE OF EMAIL >P2
EMAIL PROBLEMS >P3
BUSINESS CASE >P4
SLEEP EASY >P6
ABOUT MESSAGELABS EMAIL CONTINUITY SERVICE >P6
ABOUT MESSAGELABS, NOW PART OF SYMANTEC >P6

 >INTRODUCTION

Joni Mitchell once sang, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” The
same is true of email. When it works, nobody thinks about it. When it goes
wrong, people sit up and take notice.

James looks after email in a mid-market firm of lawyers. With several

offices, hundreds of staff and dozens of email servers, it’s a full-time job

AN HOUR’S
with a lot of stress. Email looks simple to users but it’s no cakewalk for
the people who make it work. “It’s like swans on the lake,” says James. “I’m
EMAIL DOWNTIME serene on the surface but underneath I’m paddling like crazy.”
A MONTH >A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN EMAIL MANAGER
REPRESENTS
A SIGNIFICANT What keeps James awake at night? Part of the answer, of course, is
keeping the flow of email clear of viruses and spam so that people can
COST TO THE spend more time on their work. Staying ahead of the internet criminals is
BUSINESS. a big challenge – you have to be lucky all the time, but they only have to
be lucky once.

He also worries about how to ensure that all the company’s email is fully
and securely archived. IT managers are increasingly conscious of the risk
of data loss and the burden of complying with regulations. It’s easy to
think of email as a company’s nervous system but it is also increasingly
a company’s institutional memory. It’s important to know who said what
and when.

Another challenge – routine maintenance – seems surprisingly mundane

until you consider the consequences. “We run Microsoft Exchange Server,
which needs a lot of care and feeding.” James works constantly to keep
the system patched and up to date. Unplanned outages can cause huge
disruption. Even an hour’s downtime a month, multiplied by hundreds of
people, represents a significant cost to the business.

If a minor outage turned into a disaster – a flood or fire, for example – and
email was unavailable for days, it could be a business catastrophe. James
asked himself how long his company could continue to trade without
access to email. The answer is measured in hours, not days.

Surveying the problems and looking at the racks of expensive hardware in

the server room, James knew there had to be a smarter alternative.

1
 >BUSINESS VALUE OF EMAIL

Do you remember sending your first email? For almost everyone, it is a

recent, living memory. Yet, in the two decades since the first companies
got onto the internet, it has become a fundamental part of business.

People send tens of billions of emails every day1 according to research by

UC Berkeley. The Radicati Group, a firm of analysts, estimates that there

BECAUSE EMAIL
were 1.2 billion email users worldwide in October 20072 with 516 million
business email inboxes. On average, survey respondents sent 38 email
IS UBIQUITOUS, messages per day and received 93 email messages per day. Of those 93,
NECESSARY AND an average of 18 emails included an attachment3.

CONVENIENT, The statistics reflect our own intuitive experience. Imagine how difficult
IT CANNOT BE life would be without email. Think about how many emails you get every
day. Imagine if you had to replace each one with a meeting or phone call.
ALLOWED TO FAIL.
It is so commonplace that it’s easy to forget the benefits of email. They
include:

Collaboration: Email is a one-to-many medium. It makes it easier to

coordinate teams and reach consensus. People use their inbox as an
aide-memoire and document store.

Communication: Unlike a meeting, a phone call or instant messaging,

email is asynchronous. You can respond when you’re ready. You can
time-shift communication to suit your schedule.

Coordination: Arranging meetings and projects is much easier by

email than by phone. Tools such as meeting invitations make it even
easier.

Common carrier: Email is universal. You can send an email to virtually

anyone you want to do business with. It also means your customers
can do business with you.

Convenience: Thanks to mobile email devices like the BlackBerry,

remote access and laptop PCs, you can deal with email anywhere and
any time that suits you. Email enables flexible working.

Because email is ubiquitous, necessary and convenient, it cannot be

allowed to fail. People can only do so much without it. Most companies
rely on email to communicate with their customers. A company that
didn’t communicate would quickly get a bad reputation and a business
that couldn’t take orders would soon suffer.

1
UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems rported that 31 billion emails were
sent daily in 2003 and that this figure was expected to double by 2006.
2
Source: http://email.about.com/od/emailtrivia/f/how_many_email.htm
3
Source: http://www.radicati.com/uploaded_files/news/Business_User_Survey_2007_PR.pdf

2
 >EMAIL PROBLEMS

Email problems come in all shapes and sizes:

Software reliability. Microsoft Exchange Server is the most widely

used email system. Unfortunately, it is not bulletproof. The Radicati
Group4 reports that Microsoft Exchange users (including all versions)
experience an average of 1.6 hours of unplanned downtime per month

SECURITY,
and 2.4 hours of planned downtime. This comes from commonplace
hiccups, software patching, updates, crashes and so on, and such
ARCHIVING, mundane issues are soon fixed. But without some form of fallback or
COMPLIANCE AND continuity, outages affect everybody in the company. This means lost
productivity on a grand scale.
CONTINUITY
SYSTEMS MUST Viruses and spyware. The latest Information Security Breaches Survey
by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform5
BE ABLE TO finds that very large companies experience hundreds of security
SCALE EASILY. incidents a year, with an average cost for the worst incident of $2-3
million. Even larger firms (250-500 employees) can spend around
$180,000-340,000 to fix a serious incident. MessageLabs Intelligence
finds that one email in every 269 contains a virus6. Without 100
percent protection for email and web browsing (among other
measures), companies risk being the victim of an expensive malware
attack.

Spam. Unwanted email constitutes 90.4 percent of all email,

according to the latest MessageLabs Intelligence report. For every
legitimate business email your company gets, it also has to receive
and process three pieces of junk. If you don’t have a system that
stops spam email before it reaches your network, you’re probably
paying for bandwidth and an email infrastructure that is four times
bigger than it needs to be. (Imagine paying four times for every
courier delivery or having to buy four stamps for every letter.) Worse,
the more spam that reaches your staff, the greater the impact on
their productivity.

Hardware problems. Without expensive duplication and redundancy,

a single disk or power supply failure can bring down a company’s
email system. If technicians are onsite and have the right parts,
repair needn’t take long, but many companies have four-hour service
level agreements (SLAs) on server warranties, which means that the
system could be down for much longer. What would be the cost of
standing down your business for half a day? The worst thing about an
email hiccup is that it is hard to tell people that the problem exists
without a working email system. This is a strong argument for email
continuity, as well as thorough backups and redundancy.

4
Source: http://www.radicati.com
5
Source:http://www.pwc.co.uk/eng/publications/berr_information_security_breaches_survey_2008.html
6
Source: MessageLabs Intelligence June 2009

3
 Disasters. Floods, fires, terrorist outrages and other catastrophes
are less likely than other problems but have much more serious
consequences. Large companies have elaborate disaster recovery plans
with backup data centres and so on, but these are expensive forms
of insurance. For the majority of companies, the ability to buy email
continuity as a service would be a great reassurance, as it would allow
employees to continue working.

Compliance. Email poses legal as well as technical risks to businesses.

For example, employee misuse of the internet could lead to
complaints of discrimination, harassment or defamation. It could
also result in damage to your reputation. Similarly, disclosure of
confidential information via spyware, eavesdropping or employee
misconduct could have legal implications. Missing, incomplete
or unmanageable email archives that aren’t fit for purpose leave
companies exposed. Then there are industry-specific regulations and
corporate governance rules to consider (such as the Data Protection
Act in the UK or Sarbanes-Oxley for US public companies). Failure
to comply can result in hefty fines. This is why enforcing company
policies on email use are so important. It also puts a strong emphasis
on encrypting and archiving email properly.

>BUSINESS CASE

People send ever more email with ever larger attachments. This means
that security, archiving, compliance and continuity systems must be
able to scale easily. Running these services in-house is a pain. It requires
hefty up-front capital purchases and ongoing maintenance. It also means
more hardware for already crowded server rooms. Worse, from a business
perspective, in-house services have no SLAs or guarantees. In fact, they
can often turn into expensive bottlenecks.

There is a better option: MessageLabs services. They cover Email Security

and Compliance, Archiving and Email Continuity. By outsourcing these
tasks, MessageLabs customers replace finicky in-house systems with
something that is much easier to manage and scale up.

MessageLabs offers managed services that operate 24/7 from a worldwide

network of data centres. You don’t have to buy and maintain lots of
expensive hardware inhouse and your data is stored securely on our
servers. MessageLabs gives unrivalled service level agreements, including
100 percent service availability, 100 percent email delivery and 24/7
availability for technical support. Compared to inhouse solutions, the
result is better service with less hassle.

4
Take the example of continuity. The table below compares the
requirements of replicating the MessageLabs Email Continuity service with
an in-house solution.

IN-HOUSE EMAIL MESSAGELABS

CONTINUITY EMAIL CONTINUITY
SOLUTION SERVICE
SERVERS You have to purchase Your emails, diaries
redundant servers, and contacts are
possibly in a second, stored securely on our
offsite location. network of data centres
worldwide.
SLAS Best efforts by your MessageLabs SLA for
own staff or IT 100 percent service
contractor. availability and email
delivery
MAINTENANCE Juggle management of No ongoing
email continuity maintenance. Just use
systems with other IT the MessageLabs web-
tasks based control panel or
phone to activate the
backup system.
RECOVERY Either restore from a Rapid recovery after
previous backup or outages as all sent,
attempt to received and deleted
resynchronise emails are moved back
different servers. to your email server in
a single step – with all
forensic data intact.
COST PROFILE Up-front capital Predictable fee per-user,
expenditure, plus per-month. No hidden
ongoing labour costs. costs.
SCALABILITY Buy more hardware as Scales seamlessly from
more users send more one user to tens of
mail. thousands.

5
 >SLEEP EASY

This brings us back to James, the IT manager we met at the beginning of

this article. “Email’s a bit like a phone system,” he says. “You never get a
pat on the back for keeping it running, but you risk the sack if it stops.”
MESSAGELABS
However, by replacing unwieldy in-house email management systems
with MessageLabs services, James was able to turn the situation around.
DOES THE WORK
IN ITS DATA MessageLabs does the work in its data centres so you don’t need lots of
expensive hardware in your server room. It blocks spam and viruses. It
CENTRES SO YOU enforces company policies and reduces the risk of data loss. It also ensures
DON’T NEED LOTS that the company never loses an email and protects against outages and
disasters. Not only does this mean James can sleep soundly but it also
OF EXPENSIVE means that he can spend his time on projects that move the business
HARDWARE. forward. His advice: “Nobody realises how dependent they are until they
can’t send or receive email. Think about it before it happens!”

>ABOUT MESSAGELABS EMAIL CONTINUITY SERVICE

MessageLabs Email Continuity service gives you a complete back-up email

system. Hosted in our network of worldwide data centres, the system is
always on standby and ready to take over at your command.

When the MessageLabs Email Continuity service comes on stream, it

gives users access to incoming emails, historic emails (within an agreed
period) and their usual contacts, calendars and distribution lists. They can
continue to use Microsoft Outlook, BlackBerrys or Outlook Web Access as
normal, wherever they are working.

MessageLabs Email Continuity lets you ride out temporary email

hiccups, planned maintenance or major disasters. It keeps everyone
communicating. For more information, please visit
www.messagelabs.com.au/products

>ABOUT MESSAGELABS, NOW PART OF SYMANTEC

MessageLabs services are industry-leading, integrated messaging

and web security services, with over 21,000 clients ranging
from small business to the Fortune 500 located in more than 99
countries. MessageLabs, now part of Symantec provides a range of
managed security services to protect, control, encrypt and archive
communications across Email, Web and Instant Messaging.

Visit www.messagelabs.com.au for more information

6
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