a question of continuity: maximizing email …...• in february 2009, a global, high-profile free...

A QUESTION OF CONTINUITY: MAXIMIZING EMAIL AVAILABILITY FOR YOUR BUSINESS A SYMANTEC HOSTED SERVICES WHITE PAPER

WHITEPAPER

www.messagelabs.com [email protected]


WHITEPAPER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 3

Business as Usual 3

Cause & Effect 4

Evaluating Requirements 5

The Three Alternatives 5

The Route to Success 6


WHITEPAPER

INTRODUCTION

Email outages can happen for all kinds of reasons. Whatever the cause, and whether the outage is planned or unplanned, the key question for any business is this - what happens next? More specifically, how long will the system be down? What will happen to incoming and outgoing emails already in transit? Will functionality be restored before the business’s operations start to be compromised?

The level of email availability considered acceptable will vary from organization to organization. But broadly speaking, it’s clear that expectations are relentlessly rising both within businesses and among their existing and potential customers. In a trading environment increasingly defined by e-commerce, globalization and an ‘always open’, 24/7 philosophy, the damage an email outage can inflict has become correspondingly more severe.

Inevitably, this has ramped up the pressure on IT Managers to:

• Maximize email availability

• Minimize email downtime

• Shorten disaster recovery times

• To tighten the budget

• Purchase a cost-effective solution

This white paper looks at the value of email availability and how it can be improved. It examines the key characteristics and capabilities of each type of solution. And it looks in detail at one option that meets key requirements whenever an effective email availability strategy has to be planned, implemented and managed to time and to budget.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Type ‘email outage’ into any search engine and it soon becomes obvious how prevalent this problem is, and just how elusive continuious email availability can be. Sampling a small selection of the incidents reported in the media over the last 18 months highlights the reality all too clearly – email outages are a frequent phenomenon all over the globe:

• In April 2009, BlackBerry users across the country were without email for about 3 hours in a nationwide outage that affected users on all major wireless networks. People who subscribed to a BlackBerry email service through their wireless carrier instead of being offered the service through their companies, could not send or receive email1.

• In February 2009, a global, high-profile free webmail service suffered a 2.5 hour outage that brought email down and left businesses and consumers worldwide unable to access their accounts2.

• In January 2009, a server outage caused an 8 hour shutdown of all incoming and outgoing emails at the US White House.3

Organizations hit by an outage are inevitably reluctant to disclose the extent and impact of the damage suffered. But the reality is that the bill for an hour’s email downtime can easily run to thousands of dollars and more, while disaster recovery costs can go even higher.

Regrettably, businesses that don’t experience at least one major email outage over the course of a year are a vanishingly rare breed. Such events have indisputably become a disruptive feature of today’s business landscape.

1 Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10218474-94.html2 Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/current-gmail-outage.html3 Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10150715-38.html


WHITEPAPER

CAUSE & EFFECT

In a world where over 200 billion emails circulate daily and the average employee checks their email every 15 minutes4, it’s increasingly self-evident that, when email stops functioning properly, so does the business. But one of the key challenges posed by email outages is that there’s no single underlying cause:

TYPE OF OUTAGE CAUSE EXAMPLES

Unplanned • Hardware/software problems

• Direct attack

• Natural events

• Manmade accidents/disasters

• Human error

– Server or other hardware failure– Software crashes (due to new releases, updates,

patches etc)– Database/directory corruption – Connectivity loss

– Viruses and other malware– Spam spikes overloading system

– Typhoons causing power outage or flooding – Earthquakes damaging internet cables – Cold weather causing burst pipes and flooding – Pests (ex: termite damage)

– Construction work causing power outage – Fires

– System overload – Disgruntled employees

Planned • Upgrading & maintenance

• Testing

– Email platform/operating system upgrade or migration– Essential maintenance work on email system – Office or data center move– Patch management

– Disaster recovery testing

Figure 1: Some typical causes of email outages

Whether total or partial, an email outage has the potential to impact on efficiency, productivity, competitiveness and profitability. It’s not simply a question of inconvenience. Outages have a quantifiable financial impact due to, for example:

• Inability to process orders/transactions• Inability to deal with customer queries• Loss of access to data and perhaps loss of data itself• Missed deadlines• Breaches of data security/retention regulations leading to potentially heavy fines

All of this equates to a burden on the IT Manager, expected to prevent outages happening in the first place and to resolve them with superhuman speed and at minimal expense when they do. And as help desk lines and queues become swamped with frustrated users, the IT Department sets about the urgent diagnosis, remediation, restoration and fire fighting activities that inevitability sideline other priorities and initiatives – to the detriment of the entire business.

4 Source: Computer Technology Review 24 February 2010


WHITEPAPER

EVALUATING REQUIREMENTS

The key question for IT Managers is, ‘what does my business actually need?’ Answering this requires a realistic evaluation of how much interruption to email availability is acceptable. Although this depends on the nature and scale of the business, it’s undeniable that business continuity is now typically seen as a strategic priority. Indeed, business continuity planning is itself often essential to securing regulatory compliance and is also vital to balance the cost of potential measures against the extra availability they can deliver and their likely impact on Quality of Service (QoS), Recovery Time Objective (RTO), etc.

Unplanned outages regularly exceed 6 hours; planned outages often last over 24 hours. In view of the damage one bounced email, compromised transaction or piece of lost data can cause, that’s a big window for disaster to exploit. Even if a business achieves the 99.98% availability many organizations aspire to, their email will be down for two hours a year. And service providers’ Service Level Agreements often limit themselves to 99.9% or 99.5% availability (10 and 50 hours of downtime a year).

Moreover, reducing vulnerability even to these levels can come with a big price tag. This is especially true where businesses invest in redundant systems (see next section) – hardware, software, routers, storage space, power supplies, cooling, cabling etc – which also require a real commitment to ensuring that the right level of management/maintenance effort and expertise is available in-house and/or via service contracts.

THE THREE ALTERNATIVES

The good news is that a range of options are available that can improve email availability and help protect your business against the effects of an email outage. The bad news is that, as touched on above, some of these options suffer from significant downsides.

Solutions can be divided into three main categories:

For the IT Manager weighing up the respective merits of these different, very distinct solutions the key is to know exactly how each compares with one another in terms of advantages, disadvantages and overall performance.

Tape BackupInvolves regularly backing up data on tapes/disks (ex: nightly). In the event of an email system failure, the tapes/disks can be used to restore the system to its precise condition at the point in time when the last backup was completed.

Replication/ClusteringInvolves setting up, in parallel with the primary email system, an entire secondary system that can be activated if the primary system goes down. Clustering uses multiple servers which receive the same data stream; the failure of one server will therefore not bring down the whole email system.

Email ContinuityInvolves setting up an on-demand, standby email system that is hosted off-site and is fully synchronised with the primary system. If an outage affects the primary system, the standby system can be activated immediately in order to ensure functionality is maintained.


WHITEPAPER

The table below summarizes the most important strengths and limitations of each of the three options:

STRENGTHS/ADVANTAGES LIMITATIONS/DISADVANTAGES

Tape Backup • Tried and tested, affordable recovery technique

• Easy to implement and offers a simple recovery process

• Email downtime may run to hours or days• Potential loss of all data dating between last

backup and beginning of outage

Replication/Clustering

• Email restoration time of around 3 hours• Permits maintenance work on primary

system without loss of email service

• High cost plus vulnerability to any malware, data corruption, etc. affecting the primary system.

• Replication: expert skills are needed to administer system, execute failover, etc.

• Clustering: local servers don’t protect against local power outages, etc; remote servers may not synchronize seamlessly

Email Continuity

• Low cost• Speedy deployment• Easy maintenance• Email restoration within minutes, regardless

of cause of outage

• Can’t repair/restore primary email system• May not support all email features (calendar,

contacts, etc) or provide full access to archived email

Figure 2: Key characteristics of different email availability solutions

To help compare the performance of the three categories of solution, the following table provides an overview of what each can be expected to deliver, including its ability to prevent an email outage becoming visible to the outside world:

TAPE BACKUP REPLICATION/CLUSTERING EMAIL CONTINUITY

Cost

Overall Effectiveness

Simplicity

Recovery Time

Management Burden

Preventing Outage Visibility

Figure 3: Relative performance ratings for the three key categories of email availability solution

THE ROUTE TO SUCCESS

Clearly, email continuity solutions offer significant benefits, especially when complementing investment in other options and plugging vulnerabilities that these may expose businesses to. As well as avoiding the intrinsic limitations of tape backup and reducing the major investment needed in redundant capacity (capacity that can’t be leveraged for other purposes) if a replication/clustering option is preferred, email continuity solutions can help businesses enjoy the confidence they need without paying a cost premium and with minimal burden on in-house IT resources.


WHITEPAPER

They also avoid the problem of disaster recovery testing that is either frequent or realistic enough to be of genuine value to a business. Access to a standby email system that can be activated at any time means proper testing becomes simpler, less disruptive and less expensive. Moreover, with the new version of Microsoft Exchange 2010, email continuity solutions’ ability to negate the effects of the outages often sparked by system upgrades could prove invaluable in the months ahead.

But all email continuity solutions aren’t the same. So which one delivers the industry-leading levels of functionality, flexibility and value for money that businesses need?

MessageLabs Hosted Email Continuity Service, provided by Symantec Hosted Services, offers features and benefits vital in a world where maximizing email availability and business continuity is an overriding priority for many organizations. For a highly competitive, predictable monthly fee, it ensures full email functionality whenever your primary email system fails or undergoes planned or unplanned maintenance. Administered from a single web console and backed by 24x7x365 support, this service:

• Enables failover to the standby system to be implemented by active directory user, group or by specified mailboxes, providing partial and total failover capability whenever required.

• Activates within 60 seconds.• Automatically synchronizes all contact lists, calendars and user accounts once an email

outage has been rectified.• Provides full BlackBerry® support, even if BlackBerry® servers go offline.

When operating with other Symantec Hosted Services email security offerings, the service also:

• Permits full, unbroken access to all archived email.• Provides a ‘Store & Forward’ facility that eliminates the danger of email bounce-backs

caused by email outages.• Protects businesses against inclusion on public spam blacklists due to the release of a

flood of emails as soon as their email system is restored following an outage.

Productivity and reputation protected. Disruption defused. Business efficiency and continuity ensured. The challenge of maximizing email availability really can be addressed at a competitive price. With MessageLabs Hosted Email Continuity Service strengthening your email availability strategy, outages need no longer be the bane of your business – and a resource-hungry burden on the IT Department.

ABOUT SYMANTEC HOSTED SERVICES

MessageLabs, now Symantec Hosted Services, is a leading provider of hosted messaging and web security services, with over 30,000 clients ranging from small businesses to the Fortune 500, located in 102 countries. Symantec Hosted Services protects, controls, encrypts and archives communications across email, web and instant messaging. These services are delivered by a globally distributed infrastructure and supported 24x7x365 by our security experts. This gives a convenient and cost-effective solution for managing and reducing risk while providing certainty in the exchange of business information.

For more information visit www.messagelabs.com/trials/free or contact us today at (866) 460-0000.


WHITEPAPER

>EUROPE>HEADQUARTERS1270 Lansdowne CourtGloucester Business ParkGloucester, GL3 4ABUnited KingdomTel: +44 (0) 1452 627 627Fax: +44 (0) 1452 627 628Freephone: 0800 917 7733Support: +44 (0) 1452 627 766

>LONDON3rd Floor40 Whitfield StreetLondon, W1T 2RHUnited KingdomTel: +44 (0) 203 009 6500Fax: +44 (0) 203 009 6552Support: +44 (0) 1452 627 766

>NETHERLANDSWTC AmsterdamZuidplein 36/H-TowerNL-1077 XV AmsterdamNetherlands Tel: +31 (0) 20 799 7929Fax: +31 (0) 20 799 7801Support: +44 (0) 1452 627 766

>BELGIUM/LUXEMBOURGSymantec BelgiumAstrid Business CenterIs. Meyskensstraat 2241780 Wemmel, Belgium Tel: +32 2 531 11 40Fax: +32 531 11 41

>DACHHumboldtstrasse 6Gewerbegebiet Dornach85609 Aschheim DeutschlandTel: +49 (0) 89 94320 120Support :+44 (0)870 850 3014

>AMERICAS >UNITED STATES512 Seventh Avenue6th FloorNew York, NY 10018 USAToll-free: +1 866 460 0000

>CANADA170 University AvenueToronto, ON M5H 3B3 CanadaToll-free : +1 866 460 0000

>ASIA PACIFIC>AUSTRALIALevel 14207 Kent StreetSydney NSW 2000Main: +61 2 8220 7000Fax: +61 2 8220 7075Sales: +1800 080 759 Support: +1800 088 099

>NEW ZEALANDRegus Office Suites, Plaza Level37–41 Shortland StreetAuckland 8061Main: +64 9 363 9756 Fax: +64 9 375 4101Support: +0800 449 233

>SINGAPORE6 Temasek Boulevard#11-01 Suntec Tower 4Singapore 038986 Main: +65 6333 6366Fax: +65 6235 8885Support: +800 120 4415

>HONG KONGRoom 3006, Central Plaza18 Harbour RoadTower II WanchaiHong Kong Main: +852 2528 6206Fax: +852 2526 2646Support: +852 6902 1130

>JAPANAkasaka Intercity1-11-44 AkasakaMinato-ku, Tokyo 107-0052Main: +81 3 5114 4540 Fax: +81 3 5114 4020 Support: +852 6902 1130

a question of continuity: maximizing email …...• in february 2009, a global, high-profile free...

Documents