The part email plays in our lives grows daily. We talk to friends, colleagues and the rest of the world. We arrange our social lives, spread gossip, bad jokes, and occasionally do a bit of business with it. It’s an essential tool in our connected lives, whether for business or pleasure.
So when something happens to our email, we really feel it. It’s bad enough if your personal email account goes down or gets corrupted. When a company loses email, the problem is multiplied many times. Not only do they lose communication, but they can lose important proprietary or business information that can be lost forever.
That’s why a thorough backup and recovery procedure is so important. Even with multiple, redundant servers, data can still be lost. While RAID arrays and offsite storage offer great hardware resilience, they don’t protect you from data corruption. To properly protect a business from losing all email data, you need to copy it to a completely separate system.
The handling of situations like the loss of email is called Disaster Management. It’s a dramatic word, but accurately reflects the impact on business. Backups play an integral part in helping an organization survive an event that affects normal working. That can be anything from the loss of a hard drive, an entire server, a server room or even a whole building.
The problem with disaster management is that until you need it, the program is regarded as an expense, or worse, a waste of money. It’s tempting to forego the system altogether to save money, especially when things are tight. However, the importance of a robust disaster recovery system cannot be overstated.
Email backup and recovery isn’t just about disaster management. It’s also about compliance. Every business has an obligation to record email correspondence for a set period of time. That obligation differs depending on what industry you’re in and the type of company it is. Public companies have a much higher requirement that private or limited ones. Those in finance or medical fields have the highest set of requirements to contend with.
To ensure full compliance, many companies elect to outsource their email backup and recovery to a third party. This is often the easiest option as that company will be set up to offer the best balance between cost and reliability.
Designing and implementing an email archive and recovery system that meets all the compliance requirements can be an expensive undertaking. The hardware costs alone can be prohibitive. Add to that software licensing, support and ongoing maintenance and it’s a significant investment.
Not having either solution is an accident waiting to happen. Losing email communication costs money in lost productivity, lost business, and loss of reputation when the word gets out. Those companies that communicate with their customers via email have even more to worry about.
So email recovery isn’t an idealistic, nice-to-have solution. It’s a real-life business requirement. Sure, it might be an expense while everything is running smoothly, but like our emergency services, they come into their own when you need them most.
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