Adrian Polley

Email has arguably become the single most important business application we have today. However, many businesses are unable to boast 100 per cent uptime over the past month, let alone year.

Over the past few years many organisations have struggled to keep email available during standard business hours. But now, with the arrival of mobile devices such as the BlackBerry, there is a demand for email to be available 24 hours a day.

Many organisations are running flat out simply trying to hold their dated infrastructure together. Isn’t it time that UK organisations took email more seriously?

Email communication now underpins every component of business, so what happens during the hours, even days, when email communication is blocked? Even if the system remains up, the escalating volume of email – especially spam – is creating a massive delay in delivering so-called real-time messages. Such delays – up to 12 hours in some cases – will at best undermine productivity, and at worst precipitate serious business loss.

Organisations need to take a serious look at the technology that can be wrapped around email to deliver the required compliance and resilience. One option would be software-based high-availability solutions rather than clustering.

This avoids the need for expensive, specialist hardware. It also offers more flexibility as to where the recovery servers can be located, and provides a potential solution to disaster.

Emails can be immediately archived upon receipt, then automatically deleted from the main inbox. Personnel can still retrieve messages from their archived folders which can also be made resilient using high-availability technology, while volumes on the email system are reduced.

It also raises another key issue: email usage policies. Informing users that all emails are automatically stored – and easily retrieved – is likely to have a significant impact on the volumes of non-business communication.

Lack of email availability has brought businesses to their knees, yet few organisations have an email strategy that matches its business importance. Simply upgrading every three to four years does not address issues of downtime, poor performance or huge demand for IT resources.

It is only by implementing high availability and archiving software around the base email technology that organisations can meet the requirements for 24-hour availability, disaster recovery and compliance requirements that are increasingly topping business agendas.

Adrian Polley is director at Plan-Net.

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