VideoAs E-mail becomes the lifeblood of Corporate America, what happens when the blood stops flowing? A 2003 study of 850 IT managers by research firm Dynamic Markets for Veritas Software found that one-third of respondents thought a week without E-mail was more stressful and traumatic than either a minor car accident or divorce. In addition, 68 percent said corporate employees would get irate if they lost E-mail access for as little as 30 minutes, and one-fifth said they would potentially lose their job if E-mail downtime lasted 24 hours.
That's a lot of pressure, and it offers further proof — as if any were needed — that E-mail is the killer app of the Information Age. While the actual mechanics whereby E-mail systems are kept up and running fall, in most cases, to midlevel IT staffers, E-mail poses a number of high-level management concerns that senior executives need to stay on top of. From disaster recovery to privacy to regulatory requirements and beyond, E-mail is no longer an electronic office supply, but a key — and complex — piece of corporate infrastructure.
Down, and Out?
Until recently, the most common way to respond to an E-mail outage, other than to spiff up your rÉsumÉ, was to sign on for a replication service, which constantly syncs your company's primary E-mail server and an off-site backup server so you can switch from one to the other in the event of database corruption, virus attacks, or a power failure. The cost of such peace of mind can be high — $100,000 and up for midsize organizations and much higher for larger companies.
But new options are emerging. MessageOne, for example, now offers a more-reasonable solution called Emergency Messaging System, or EMS. With this approach, managers supply backup E-mail and text-messaging contact information for all employees, including mobile phones, pagers, BlackBerry devices, and alternative E-mail addresses. If disaster strikes, EMS can be activated either by calling MessageOne's emergency line or using a Web browser to access a secure page. Upon activation, the system sends alerts to all employees at their alternate addresses and automatically reroutes mail to a secure EMS hosted by SunGard and IBM. Employees are then able to receive and send their corporate E-mail via the Web. Once the core E-mail system is restored, all traffic sent and received during the downtime is assimilated into the primary E-mail system.
When a severe rainstorm hit Austin, Texas, in the spring of 2003, commercial offset and digital printer CC West completely lost its Internet connection. For a company that does 80 percent of its business via E-mail, that was not a good thing — it stood to lose at least $10,000 worth of business for every day E-mail was down. But the company had contracted with MessageOne just six months before, so it was able to reconnect with its largest customers, including Dell Inc., within minutes.
"We immediately called in and activated [the system]," explains James Diorio, vice president of operations at CC West. "It notified our entire sales force, and we were able to send files and receive job orders and even 50-megabyte high-resolution PDF [portable document format] files in no time."
Many firms have been turning to commercial (that is, free) and in-house instant messaging systems as a temporary backup when their primary E-mail systems go down. However, security concerns and the inability to archive important messages often make IM a less-than-satisfactory fallback position. IM is so popular that many of the same disaster-recovery issues now being addressed for E-mail will probably be extended to these systems, but for now analysts caution companies against a default reliance on this technology.
Companies that provide outsourced E-mail services often promise 99.9 percent uptime and disaster-recovery capabilities, among other perks. While some very large companies have signed on, outsourcing of E-mail is generally an approach favored by midsize firms.
Beware the Trash Folder
As more and more business becomes documented in E-mail rather than memos and reports, document retention becomes a challenge on several levels. Whether it's compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, or laws governing the handling of patient data in the health-care industry, most companies are grappling with the questions of which E-mail messages to save, how to save them, how long to save them, and what will it all cost?
Ignorance of regulations — whether at the federal, state, or industry level — is not bliss: the risks of noncompliance can be severe. In March the SEC fined Banc of America Securities $10 million for stalling on providing evidence in an investigation: the company had claimed it would take too much effort to produce the required archived E-mails. In December 2002, the commission fined Wall Street brokerage firms Deutsche Bank Securities, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, and U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray more than $8 million for failing to retain E-mails for the proper SEC-mandated retention period.
While some of these regulations are new, companies can't claim to be blindsided by the need to hang on to E-mail; as far back as 1998, Procter & Gamble was fined $10,000 for not properly storing E-mail messages relevant to an ongoing court case.
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