SIR - E-mail is now a business critical application so why is it that most companies cannot boast 100% e-mail uptime over the past month, let alone year?! It's fair to say that not only is e-mail now consuming a disproportionate amount of IT resource to keep it going, but regular glitches in both availability and performance are causing significant business damage.

IT and security managers need to take a serious look at the technologies that can be wrapped around e-mail to deliver the required compliance and resilience, from content and spam filters through to high availability and archiving.

While there is an obvious cost to such investment, there are clear benefits. For example, opting for software-based high availability solutions rather than clustering avoids the need for expensive, specialist hardware and offers more flexibility about where the recovery servers may be located.

In addition to meeting compliance requirements, archiving offers a solution to the perennial problem of managing e-mail volumes. E-mails can be immediately archived on receipt and then, after a predetermined period of, say, one-to-six months, automatically deleted from the main e-mail store.

Organisations also need to evolve their e-mail usage policies and improve user education. For example, good archiving tools work on an ‘archive everything' approach, informing users that all e-mails are automatically stored and, therefore, easily retrieved.

Adrian Polley Director Plan-Net

Source

SMT