HIPAA Laws

Much of the publicity and marketing material surrounding e-mail archives and archiving is about the compliance aspect. While that’s important to business, it’s mainly only the threat of fines or prosecution that drives compliance.

What about business continuity? Most larger organizations have extensive business continuity plans for disaster recovery situations. Some even have spare sites where production continues while the plan is in place, others have other contingencies, like home working, to ensure the business continues to function during this time.

It is estimated that over 80% of business communication is done over e-mail, both internally and externally. What would happen if it all suddenly disappeared? Even is a disaster recovery scenario it would damage business, at worst cripple it. So maintaining an up-to-date e-mail archive is essential for disaster recovery as well as compliance.

While disaster recovery situations should be mercifully rare, the scenario illustrates the importance of having backups of everything. Modern business depend so much on e-mail, that is should be the very first thing, after production to be considered for backup and redundancy. Having redundant e-mail systems, with separate e-mail archives is the best way to continue being productive if the worst happens.

If one mail server fails, the redundant one can pick up where it left off, if both fail, there will be a recent archive which can be used to replace any mails that are lost during the outage.

Having a secondary site, with redundant servers is beyond the scope of many smaller businesses, yet they remain no less important. The solution for those businesses is to use a third-party vendor to supply a hosted e-mail archive and backup, or even primary e-mail functionality.

It would certainly cost much less than a dedicated infrastructure that would only be used a couple of times a year. Using one n production would save having to have an e-mail infrastructure in the first place.

Hosting has the advantage of being off-site by its very nature. So any disaster that befalls the company will leave e-mail unaffected. This has significant advantages as an email backup can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. There is no longer a need for a secondary site for disaster recovery in most cases. Staff can simply go home and work from there until the situation returns to normal.

If the disaster is a genuine one, not having hardware on site lowers the cost of returning to normal considerably. Not having to spend thousands of dollars replacing damaged or destroyed servers is going to take much of the sting out of the recovery for any organization, large or small.

A hosted system would always have the latest hardware, software and security and would be safe from any situation that befell the clients business. The e-mail archive would be undamaged, available and could still respond to E-discovery requests as necessary. As far as business continuity is concerned, a hosted e-mail model is the ideal answer to many problems.