The Critical Need for Email Continuity

By Michael Osterman
in

We are just about to publish a white paper on email continuity, the focus of which is on the high cost of email downtime and the critical need to maintain continuity of email as close to 24×7 as possible.

Email downtime carries with it a number of consequences that can vary widely in their short- and long-term impacts on an organization. For example:

  • If we assume that email users are just 28% less productive during an email downtime incident (the proportion of their day spent using email), a very conservative figure of 30 minutes of unplanned downtime each month for users whose fully burdened salary is $65,000 per year will result in an annual productivity cost of downtime totaling $52.50 per user per year—an organization of 500 users will, therefore, suffer productivity loss of $26,250 each year.
  • However, productivity costs can be substantially greater if email is unavailable for extended periods, as can occur during power outages or storms. This might result in productivity loss of 100% if employees go home for the day, resulting in significantly greater productivity losses than in the example above.
  • Of particular note in the context of downtime are mobile users who typically are more sensitive to email interruptions. This sensitivity to downtime—and the economic consequences that accompany it—are driven by the fact that mobile users often have no viable alternative means of communication if they cannot communicate via email, they are often more pressed for time while traveling, and they have shorter windows in which to communicate (e.g., while on a layover at an airport).
  • During outages of the corporate email system, users will look for alternate means to send time-sensitive or other critical content, including personal Webmail systems. Use of these personal systems means that corporate data is sent without first being processed by the archiving, content filtering, security, encryption or other corporate systems that might be in place, putting the organization at risk on a number of levels. This cost is particularly difficult to quantify, since it can result in consequences as diverse as leakage of sensitive corporate data all the way to charges of spoliation of evidence in a lawsuit.

There are a number of other difficult-to-quantify consequences from email downtime, as well, including loss of corporate reputation when prospects, customers and business partners receive a bounceback when sending email—a prospective customer who sends an email only to have it bounce back might never follow up later. An email outage might prevent a timely response to a proposal, order or answer to a client inquiry and could lead to a significant loss of revenue in the long run. Unplanned downtime incidents require IT staff to stop doing other work and instead focus on the email emergency at hand, thereby delaying other work.

Published December 7, 2010