E-mail Disaster Recovery Planning
Find out how ActivSupport E-mail business continuity services work with our 6 FAQ and associated answers.
Why do I need access to email during an emergency?
Tell me about this service? What are the features?
How do you charge for the Business Continuity Service?
Using the above example what is the ROI on this expenditure?
How do I get Business Continuity activated for my domain?
What are companies using the Business Continuity service for?
1. Why do I need access to email during an emergency?
If your email server ever goes down for any reason then the chances you will go out of business increase with every hour that your employees cannot communicate effectively with each other, suppliers, and customers. Deals can be lost, productivity affected, and sadly your company ruined without effective communication in an emergency. E-mail is the number one communication tool used by businesses today. Over 50% of businesses that experience some kind of disaster will never re-open their doors. E-mail is so vital to business in the 21st century that you shouldn't be satisfied with anything less than 100% availability. If you are skeptical then send an email round the office asking everyone not to use email for just one hour. You will hear moans and groans and you can be sure that productivity will drop drastically. A web-based interface where all your employees can login to from anywhere during an emergency will do amazing things for morale and confidence if you are ever unlucky enough to have a disaster strike your business.
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2. Tell me about this service? What are the features?
Email is mission critical for all businesses today. Whether a business is affected by fire, theft, vandalism, flood, employee sabotage, terrorism, earthquake, or simply a hardware failure, it is imperative that email remains a bulletproof communication option during and immediately after any type of negative incident. The Business Continuity service was created by ActivSupport to help ensure that companies would never be without the use of their email accounts and the information contained within, regardless of the circumstances. Some of the features include: Email is mission critical for all businesses today. Whether a business is affected by fire, theft, vandalism, flood, employee sabotage, terrorism, earthquake, or simply a hardware failure, it is imperative that email remains a bulletproof communication option during and immediately after any type of negative incident. The Business Continuity service was created by ActivSupport to help ensure that companies would never be without the use of their email accounts and the information contained within, regardless of the circumstances. Some of the features include: Works with your existing in-house email system: The service is setup to relay mail to your primary in-house email system no matter what type of email server software you are running. You simply need to point your inbound mail (MX record) at our server and then we forward all the mail to your server. When an email message comes into our system we make a copy of it (to the corresponding email account), store it securely, and then forward the original message to your server. You will not notice a significant delay during this process. If you wish to relay your mail back out through our system we will capture every user's sent mail and store it in their corresponding hot-standby web based email account. Always ready when you need it: A world-class data center is monitored continually and is housed in a special earthquake ready building. Multiple redundancies exist on the hardware level and for power and bandwidth. In an emergency you will never be without access to your email. Simply have your employees log into their standby account from any Internet connected web-browser anywhere in the world. Secure: Physical security of your data is important. Our world-class data center is secured in a building with no public access and our servers are in locked in secure cabinets. ActivSupport uses state of the art firewall technology to protect against hackers and when you connect to your email account it is by browser with 128-bit encryption. Customize your retention period: The service is billed based on the total storage your email accounts are using. Using our Messaging Maestro Administration interface you can adjust how long you wish to retain email either on a global basis or by groups of accounts. This allows you to keep your costs down while giving you the flexibility to store your precious email for any length of time you wish. Synchronizes with your email server via LDAP: If your email server supports LDAP queries and you have enough users to justify it, we can setup our service to query your account list so that the mirrored account list always matches the account list on your email server. Layer on other important services: Virus scanning and Spam filtering are important services to consider and can be added to your service if you wish.
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3. How do you charge for the Business Continuity Service?
We have a very affordable tier-pricing structure that makes it possible for business of ALL size to take advantage of our services. For instance, organization with 20 employees would end up inn most cases paying less than $100 a month. In this example, it would enable employees to access a copy of their email in the event an in-house email server or internet connection interruption, and provide ongoing protection against both spam and viruses during regular operations; a very good deal indeed since our service cost less than most corporate Anti-Spam or Anti-Virus software alone.
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4. Using the above example what is the ROI on this expenditure?
In a conservative analysis it can be shown that the break-even on this expenditure is 46 minutes of employee time in a given year. This is calculated as follows: Assumptions: Employee fully burdened cost per hour: $39.00 US 250 employees Cost of one hour's downtime is $9750.00 (250 x $39.00) Cost of base service $7500.00 per year ($625 x 12) $7500 / $9750 x 60 minutes = 46 minutes per employee per year Think of $625 per month as very low cost insurance against some very serious potential costs due to lost productivity. If your Microsoft Exchange server goes down for more than 46 minutes a year for any reason then using this service should be a no-brainer!
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5. What are companies using the Business Continuity service for?
There are many different situations where the service is extremely valuable. One of our customers uses it in case of a strike because the people who administer the email system are unionized and would not be of assistance if during a strike situation the email system "coincidentally" went down. Any company that recognizes the near impossibility of keeping an email server up in perpetuity can benefit from having hot-standby accounts to protect against lost productivity and business interruption. Even when a company's in-house system is functioning properly, it is sometimes much more convenient for traveling and remote employees to access their email using a web browser.
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6. How do I get Business Continuity activated for my domain?
Please contact your Activsupport account representative at 1-877 ACTIVNET or sales@activsupport.com and they will have Business Continuity activated as a service for your domain.
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