Nearly 45% of business-critical information is housed in messaging applications such as Exchange, largely thanks to the volume of traffic generated by increasingly big attachments such as multimedia files and the integration of voice messages with fax.
Messaging systems increasingly support vital applications including workflow and knowledge management, making the data they store even more voluminous and incredibly valuable to the host company. E-mail is a particularly popular application, of course, with a typical end user spending nearly 26% of his or her day on e-mail management.
When downtime occurs, the state of the business is frozen in time at the point at which the system failed – leaving staff to operate on out-of-date information (if at all). People outside of the company are unaware of any problem, but this brings its own troubles. For example, clients may e-mail the company with queries or complaints, and yet receive no response. Time-critical documents such as legal contracts may arrive, but no-one inside of the host company will be aware of that.
What IT and security directors need is a solution that guarantees the uptime of Exchange, and which costs less than the total private medical insurance of a single company's IT staff in a year – a mere four-figure number.
At this price, it becomes affordable for both enterprise and medium-sized users to insure themselves against an event that they know will happen – ie Exchange downtime – in comparison to paying out shed loads of cash on a disaster recovery plan which will only be needed when the moon turns blue.
If all of these losses could be avoided, as well as tens of thousands of pounds saved by implementing one solution bought out of petty cash, who wouldn't purchase it in a heartbeat?
Source
SMT
Postscript
Neil Robertson, Group Managing Director, The Neverfall Group