Email is Business Critical
Email is a critical business tool. In less than two decades, email has grown to equal the telephone as one of the essential tools for conducting business. Email is uniquely positioned at the heart of business critical communications AND business critical data.
Businesses rely on email to coordinate, collaborate, prospect, sell, manage, etc. In addition to sending and receiving email, many organizations also use their email system to manage and share calendars and contacts, adding another layer of criticality.
For the unprepared organization, an email outage carries harsh consequences, including:
- Missed Deadlines
- Angry Clients
- Lost Opportunity
- Wasted Investment
- Reduced Revenue
- Damaged Reputation
Depending on the industry (i.e. Legal, Financial), there might even be implications of malpractice or regulatory non-compliance.
50% of all businesses that lose access to mission critical data or applications, including email, to an accident, equipment failure, disaster or other cause and are unable to recover within 24 hours go out of business within 6 months[1].
Email is Fragile
Of all the critical tools businesses use, email is by far the most vulnerable.
The technology and infrastructure that power email today are still based on the original email system devised in the 1970’s, where approximately fifty academics sent research papers back and forth to one another. Trust was an inherent part of the system. Because the community was so small and so tightly knit, the likelihood of abuse was close to zero. Fast forward a few decades to now, and we have billions of emails sent everyday. On top of that, unknown masses of super-sharp cyber criminals are always waiting just around the corner to steal money and data.
This doesn’t mean that the whole system is on the verge of collapse, it just means that a secure, reliable business email system requires a large investment and a great deal of care and expertise to build, manage, maintain and backup.
Email Outages can occur at anytime and are caused by maddening number of factors–from a spilled cup of coffee to a natural disaster. When you manage your own e-mail server, you have to be prepared to deal with hardware failure, security breeches, missed updates/patches, fire, flood, tornados, hurricanes, theft, and more. If an email hosting company manages email for you, you have to know that they are prepared for the same.
When Your Email Goes Down…
If your email server or an ancillary piece of your email system fails and you don’t have a backup system in place, two things immediately happen:
- No one at your business can send or receive email
- Any email that is inbound to your server is probably lost forever
Depending on how you are setup, you may also have problems accessing historical email, contacts and calendars. What happens next is easy enough to imagine.
Eliminate the Risk of an Email Outage
Today’s business climate is such that if an email system fails, businesses need to be able to continue to conduct business without missing a beat. Anything less exposes the business to untold risk.
A business can easily avoid the harsh consequences of an Email Outage with a professional Emergency Mail service. Emergency Mail Services (a.k.a. “Email Continuity,” “Disaster Recovery”) come in many colors, shapes and sizes. Many of them are inadequate.
To be completely effective, an Emergency Mail Service must have the following four characteristics:
- Includes an intuitive web based email client that users are already familiar with
- Contains a history of recent Email for users to reference
- Provides Immediate Switch Over to the backup system so that no email, deadline or opportunity is missed
- Requires little to no IT Intervention so that IT support does not become overwhelmed
Without these four capabilities, an Emergency Mail system is really just going to be as effective as a “band-aid on a bullet hole.”
Don’t Chance It
You business is important to you. Email is important to your business. Emergency Mail helps to ensure that an unforeseen email outage doesn’t spiral into a full blown company crisis.
About MxToolBox, Inc: Based in Austin, TX, MxToolBox, Inc. is a leading provider of on demand email services to small business throughout the USA and Canada. MxToolBox’s Email Security, Emergency Email, Managed Email and Email Archiving services make email secure, reliable and effective for over 30,000 users. Visit http://www.mxtoolbox.com/ or call 866-MxToolBox (866-698-6652) for more details.
[1] Gartner Group