Download pdf - Email Continuity Wp Jul091

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>EMAIL CONTINUITYYOU DONT KNOW WHAT YOUVE

GOT TILL ITS 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


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>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


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>INTRODUCTION

Joni Mitchell once sang, You dont know what youve got till it s gone. The

same is true o email. When it works, nobody thinks about it. When it goes

wrong, people sit up and take notice.

James looks ater email in a mid-market rm o lawyers. With several

oces, hundreds o sta and dozens o email servers, its a ull-time job

with a lot o stress. Email looks simple to users but its no cakewalk or

the people who make it work. Its like swans on the lake, says James. Im

serene on the surace but underneath Im paddling like crazy.

>A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN EMAIL MANAGER

What keeps James awake at night? Part o the answer, o course, is

keeping the fow o email clear o viruses and spam so that people can

spend more time on their work. Staying ahead o the internet criminals isa 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 companys email is ully

and securely archived. IT managers are increasingly conscious o the risk

o data loss and the burden o complying with regulations. Its easy to

think o email as a companys nervous system but it is also increasingly

a companys institutional memory. Its important to know who said what

and when.

Another challenge routine maintenance seems surprisingly mundaneuntil you consider the consequences. We run Microsot Exchange Server,

which needs a lot o care and eeding. James works constantly to keep

the system patched and up to date. Unplanned outages can cause huge

disruption. Even an hours downtime a month, multiplied by hundreds o

people, represents a signicant cost to the business.

I a minor outage turned into a disaster a food or re, or example and

email was unavailable or days, it could be a business catastrophe. James

asked himsel 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 o expensive hardware inthe server room, James knew there had to be a smarter alternative.

AN HOURSEMAIL DOWNTIMEA MONTHREPRESENTSA SIGNIFICANT

COST TO THEBUSINESS.

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>BUSINESS VALUE OF EMAIL

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

recent, living memory. Yet, in the two decades since the rst companies

got onto the internet, it has become a undamental part o business.

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

UC Berkeley. The Radicati Group, a rm o analysts, estimates that there

were 1.2 billion email users worldwide in October 20072 with 516 million

business email inboxes. On average, survey respondents sent 38 email

messages per day and received 93 email messages per day. O those 93,

an average o 18 emails included an attachment3.

The statistics refect our own intuitive experience. Imagine how dicult

lie would be without email. Think about how many emails you get every

day. Imagine i you had to replace each one with a meeting or phone call.

It is so commonplace that its easy to orget the benets o 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 youre ready. You can

time-shit 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 fexible working.

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

allowed to ail. People can only do so much without it. Most companies

rely on email to communicate with their customers. A company that

didnt communicate would quickly get a bad reputation and a business

that couldnt take orders would soon suer.

BECAUSE EMAILIS UBIQUITOUS,NECESSARY ANDCONVENIENT,IT CANNOT BE

ALLOWED TO FAIL.

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1UC Berkeley School o Inormation Management and Systems rported that 31 billion emails weresent daily in 2003 and that this gure was expected to double by 2006.2Source: http://email.about.com/od/emailtrivia//how_many_email.htm3Source: http://www.radicati.com/uploaded_les/news/Business_User_Survey_2007_PR.pd


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>EMAIL PROBLEMS

Email problems come in all shapes and sizes:

Sotware reliability. Microsot Exchange Server is the most widely

used email system. Unortunately, it is not bulletproo. The RadicatiGroup4 reports that Microsot Exchange users (including all versions)

experience an average o 1.6 hours o unplanned downtime per month

and 2.4 hours o planned downtime. This comes rom commonplace

hiccups, sotware patching, updates, crashes and so on, and such

mundane issues are soon xed. But without some orm o allback or

continuity, outages aect everybody in the company. This means lost

productivity on a grand scale.

Viruses and spyware. The latest Inormation Security Breaches Survey

by the Department or Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reorm5

nds that very large companies experience hundreds o securityincidents a year, with an average cost or the worst incident o $2-3

million. Even larger rms (250-500 employees) can spend around

$180,000-340,000 to x a serious incident. MessageLabs Intelligence

nds that one email in every 269 contains a virus6. Without 100

percent protection or email and web browsing (among other

measures), companies risk being the victim o an expensive malware

attack.

Spam. Unwanted email constitutes 90.4 percent o all email,

according to the latest MessageLabs Intelligence report. For every

legitimate business email your company gets, it also has to receiveand process three pieces o junk. I you dont have a system that

stops spam email beore it reaches your network, youre probably

paying or bandwidth and an email inrastructure that is our times

bigger than it needs to be. (Imagine paying our times or every

courier delivery or having to buy our stamps or every letter.) Worse,

the more spam that reaches your sta, the greater the impact on

their productivity.

Hardware problems. Without expensive duplication and redundancy,

a single disk or power supply ailure can bring down a companys

email system. I technicians are onsite and have the right parts,

repair neednt take long, but many companies have our-hour servicelevel agreements (SLAs) on server warranties, which means that the

system could be down or much longer. What would be the cost o

standing down your business or hal 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 or email

continuity, as well as thorough backups and redundancy.

SECURITY,ARCHIVING,COMPLIANCE ANDCONTINUITYSYSTEMS MUST

BE ABLE TOSCALE EASILY.

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4Source: http://www.radicati.com5Source: http://www.pwc.co.uk/eng/publications/berr_inormation_security_breaches_survey_ 2008.html6Source: MessageLabs Intelligence June 2009


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Disasters. Floods, res, 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 orms

o insurance. For the majority o companies, the ability to buy emailcontinuity 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 o the internet could lead to

complaints o discrimination, harassment or deamation. It could

also result in damage to your reputation. Similarly, disclosure o

condential inormation via spyware, eavesdropping or employee

misconduct could have legal implications. Missing, incomplete

or unmanageable email archives that arent t or purpose leave

companies exposed. Then there are industry-specic regulations andcorporate governance rules to consider (such as the Data Protection

Act in the UK or Sarbanes-Oxley or US public companies). Failure

to comply can result in hety nes. This is why enorcing 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 requireshety up-ront capital purchases and ongoing maintenance. It also means

more hardware or already crowded server rooms. Worse, rom a business

perspective, in-house services have no SLAs or guarantees. In act, they

can oten 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 nicky in-house systems with

something that is much easier to manage and scale up.

MessageLabs oers managed services that operate 24/7 rom a worldwide

network o data centres. You dont have to buy and maintain lots o

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 or technical support. Compared to inhouse solutions, the

result is better service with less hassle.

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Take the example o continuity. The table below compares the

requirements o replicating the MessageLabs Email Continuity service with

an in-house solution.

5

IN-HOUSE EMAILCONTINUITYSOLUTION

MESSAGELABSEMAIL CONTINUITYSERVICE

SERVERS You have to purchaseredundant servers,

possibly in a second,

osite location.

Your emails, diaries

and contacts are

stored securely on our

network o data centres

worldwide.

SLAS Best eorts by your

own sta or ITcontractor.

MessageLabs SLA or

100 percent serviceavailability and email

delivery

MAINTENANCE Juggle management oemail continuity

systems with other IT

tasks

No ongoing

maintenance. Just use

the MessageLabs web-

based control panel or

phone to activate the

backup system.

RECOVERY Either restore rom a

previous backup orattempt to

resynchronise

dierent servers.

Rapid recovery ater

outages as all sent,received and deleted

emails are moved back

to your email server in

a single step with all

orensic data intact.

COST PROFILE Up-ront capitalexpenditure, plus

ongoing labour costs.

Predictable ee per-user,

per-month. No hidden

costs.

SCALABILITY Buy more hardware as

more users send moremail.

Scales seamlessly rom

one user to tens othousands.


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>SLEEP EASY

This brings us back to James, the IT manager we met at the beginning othis article. Emails a bit like a phone system, he says. You never get a

pat on the back or keeping it running, but you risk the sack i it stops.

However, by replacing unwieldy in-house email management systems

with MessageLabs services, James was able to turn the situation around.

MessageLabs does the work in its data centres so you dont need lots o

expensive hardware in your server room. It blocks spam and viruses. It

enorces company policies and reduces the risk o data loss. It also ensures

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

means that he can spend his time on projects that move the businessorward. His advice: Nobody realises how dependent they are until they

cant send or receive email. Think about it beore it happens!

>ABOUT MESSAGELABS EMAIL CONTINUITY SERVICE

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

system. Hosted in our network o 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 agreedperiod) and their usual contacts, calendars and distribution lists. They can

continue to use Microsot 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 inormation, 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

rom small business to the Fortune 500 located in more than 99

countries. MessageLabs, now part o Symantec provides a range o

managed security services to protect, control, encrypt and archive

communications across Email, Web and Instant Messaging.

Visit www.messagelabs.com.au or more inormation

MESSAGELABSDOES THE WORKIN ITS DATACENTRES SO YOUDONT NEED LOTS

OF EXPENSIVEHARDWARE.

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