Building A Better Email Recovery Disaster Plan
If businesses think disaster recovery plans are only necessary for those living in hurricane high-risk areas, vendors in the business continuity space want to enlighten and warn them. The number one reason to have an email disaster recovery plan is hardware failure. Be sure to turn to page 22 of this issue for the other top reasons to have a plan as well as a review of what email disaster recovery means today. There are many things to consider when formulating a disaster recovery plan, so we asked a few vendors to give us their top three most important pieces of advice.
From Andrew Barnes
1. Companies should focus on continuous availability rather than recovery, ensuring that users remain connected at all times to email and other critical applications. 2. Companies need to become much more proactive in monitoring the health of the email environment. According to Osterman Research, user complaints are the most common method used by IT departments to learn that email systems have gone down. 3. Corporations should turn their focus from disaster recovery, which by definition means user disruption, to keeping users connected to email no matter the source of failure. The most important goal is that email should be continuously available and users should be unaware that there have been issues before, during or after an incident. IT downtime happens; but there should be no business downtime."
Andrew Barnes, senior VP of corporate development of Neverfail
From Steve Lewis
1. Make sure users are never down—regardless of the type of failure (local server or site). 2. Ensure users have full access to all of their email, calendars and attachments via the clients and devices (such as mobile) that they normally use. 3. Be sure to protect both applications and data."
Steve Lewis, CEO of Teneros
From Brian Mullins
1. Reduce the need for human intervention in the event of a disaster. By automating disaster protection, you reduce human error during a crisis and eliminate your dependence on a small number of key employees. Systems that provide automatic disaster protection also require less maintenance and testing to ensure performance during a disaster. 2. Minimize time and resources needed to return to a disaster-tolerant state. Disaster recovery is not just recovering data and restoring the email system operation after downtime; it also involves bringing systems back to their fully redundant, highly available state once the disaster is over. This step may involve replacing hardware damaged in a disaster, restoring lost data, replacing redundant network connections, and reloading applications or operating systems. Look for a solution that recovers on its own once power and connectivity are restored at the primary or new site. 3. Test frequently. It is the only way an enterprise can be confident about its disaster recovery plan. Testing is also important for refining business continuity procedures and processes. Many companies do not perform routine testing because it drains IT resources and requires Exchange downtime. One workaround is to deploy a solution that can be tested without IT intervention or interruption of end-user service."
Brian Mullins, director of corporate communications for Marathon Technologies
MB/TMP