Contingency Planning

Companies Not Protecting E-Mail Servers In Case Of Disaster According To Survey

April 9, 2008

Even amidst today's enlightened business environments, many companies are still leaving their data centers open to severe risk. According to a study released by Osterman Research and sponsored by Neverfail, more than 50 percent of the participants report they are consolidating all of their e-mail servers into a single data center in one geographic location. Yet less than 1 percent says they are protecting these systems with redundant servers in case of disaster -- leaving most at risk of losing data and severely compromising their business.

Encouragingly, the report also found that two-thirds of these companies consider disaster recovery and business continuity an important or critical driver for the adoption of virtualization technology, second only to reducing hardware costs. Regardless of the data center environment, the ubiquity of e-mail use to communicate and exchange business-critical content makes it one of the most important business applications -- one that simply can not go down.

Other interesting facts from the survey and other recent Osterman Research surveys:

• Nearly three out of five organizations consider enabling continuous operations as an important or critical driver for adopting virtualization.
• However, most decision makers do not understand virtualization well enough to make sound decisions about its adoption.
• Messaging system reliability/uptime is a serious problem for one in five organizations, impacting millions of users in the workplace. Despite this, 3 out of 4 respondents did not see messaging as an important part of their virtualization project. These companies, therefore, must look to alternative technologies to provide business continuity and disaster recovery.

"We were quite surprised to find so many businesses relying on 'luck' and still thinking about next steps when considering business continuity for their most important applications," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "It was no surprise that more than half of respondents are planning to put together a virtual environment to address the problem. But what was interesting was the lack of understanding of virtualization amongst the decision makers. It is clear that where a company is building out their business continuity plans there is a need for better integration and understanding of virtualization to deliver continuous availability to prevent any type of business interruption."

"Virtualization is experiencing rapid market growth because of its ability to improve efficiency in data centers through cost savings and resource management," said Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development at Neverfail. "It is good to see that virtualization vendors are now waking companies up to the urgent need for business continuity and disaster recovery. Clearly though there is some way to go for companies to understand how virtualization can be best implemented to protect critical parts of the business."