How to Avoid
Email Outages
No Matter What Happens!
Patricia B. Seybold
CEO & Sr. COnsultant, Patricia Seybold Group

NETTING IT OUT
Your company can’t afford to be without email, yet all of our email systems are under siege-by virus attacks and worms, by cyber terrorism, by natural and man-made disasters like earthquakes and power failures, as well as by normal and routine hardware and software failures, human error, and configuration mistakes.
The requirements for email backup and recovery differ from those for data centres and other operational systems. Unlike other operational systems, which require expensive mirroring or frequent replication in order to offer high availability, new continuity solutions beginning to appear in the market no longer require email systems to be completely mirrored to ensure on-demand availability. Instead, you can replicate your email directories periodically and fail over to a backup email system without missing a beat. With these new products, it’s quite easy and cost-effective to re-route email automatically in times of crisis and to resume email service exactly where you left off in a matter of seconds, not hours.
MessageOne offers an email continuity solution called EMS (Emergency Messaging System), which provides email continuity through any type of planned or unplanned outage-ranging from backups to virus attacks-at a fraction of the cost you’d pay for a fully redundant system. And since the backup email system is built using a different architecture from the one it’s replacing, your backup email is much less likely to be compromised.
EMAIL IS YOUR COMPANY’S LIFEBLOOD
Today’s businesses run on email. Email feeds our lead pipelines, coordinates our activities, fuels our decisions, closes our deals, and nurtures our relationships. Email eradicates boundaries. Prospects, customers, business partners, suppliers, and others all reach into and through our organisations via email.
Internet-based email is not only the lifeblood of modern-day business, it’s also the most transformational technology for every organisation. Email cuts across organisational boundaries and impacts organisations’ metabolisms. Companies that are nimble and responsive have smooth-flowing, well-honed, email-enabled decision-making and action-taking. Organisations that are deliberate and sluggish often find their corporate arteries clogged by email blockages — flurries of inconsequential internal emails — intermixed with important decisions waiting for resolution, with management dictates, and with urgent client requests.

What Happens When Email Goes Down or Is Impaired?
What happens to a modern-day business when its email disappears — for an hour, a day, a week, or longer?
* The biggest negative impact is on employee morale. All of a sudden, lots of people can’t do their jobs. Executives can’t communicate easily. Customer support personnel can’t get answers. Salespeople lose context and can’t continue their deals-in-progress. Everyone is distracted, waiting for the problem to be fixed and figuring out and communicating work-arounds.
* The largest risk is to a company’s ability to recover quickly from any disaster. Without email, you can’t communicate efficiently to all your employees. If you can’t communicate, you can’t recover.
* The largest measurable impact is on time-to-action. Leads fall through the cracks. Customer orders aren’t received. Customer issues go undetected and unresolved. Decisions are delayed. Deals take longer to close. Email-enabled workflows cease to function. Employee productivity goes south. Revenues and billing are adversely impacted.

DOCUMENTED COSTS OF EMAIL OUTAGES. Every company might choose to measure the impacts of email outages differently, but the recent spate of disasters, virus attacks, and electrical black-outs have yielded the following startling numbers, according to MessageOne’s own client base :
*$100,000 an hour lost in both revenues and productivity was reported by a law firm whose 2,000 attorneys were without email for one day.
*8,000 garment manufacturing orders lost, representing $1 million in lost or delayed revenues for one manufacturer whose fax-to-email gateways were down for a day.
*$235,000 in lost commissions due to a 6-day email outage at a head-hunting firm.
*A high tech manufacturer knows that it would lose $1.3 million per day in revenues for each day of email outage.

Needed: Affordable, Immediate Email Continuity
What’s the best way to solve the problem of dealing with unforeseen (or even foreseen) email outages? Whether the email outage is caused by a virus or worm attack, an ISP hiccup, a terrorist attack, an electrical black-out, a computer systems glitch, or a hurricane, tornado, or flood, the best solution includes the following five steps:
1. Move your company’s email immediately to a backup system that is unaffected by the problem. The backup email capability should be functionally equivalent to, but structurally different from, the email system that was compromised — a basic rule of thumb when dealing with security issues.
2. Don’t lose any incoming or outgoing emails.
3. Get all of your people up and running on the backup system immediately with the important context carried over (critical work-in-progress, important email interaction history, contact files, calendars, etc.) and with a minimum of disruption.
4. Don’t let your customers or business partners experience any impact from the outage.
5. As soon as your corporate email is fixed, restore all the emails sent and received during the outage, so there’s a clean, accurate audit trail.
These are the services that are currently provided by MessageOne’s Emergency Messaging System (EMS). The cost: about $1 per month per inbox. The time it takes to activate the EMS in the event of an enterprise email outage is less than 60 seconds.
MESSAGEONE’S EMS
Who Is MessageOne?
MessageOne Incorporated is a privately-held company based in Austin, Texas, and founded by venture-capitalist Adam Dell (Michael Dell’s brother) in 1998. The company’s CEO and president is Satin Mirchandani (formerly vice president and general manager of Trilogy/PC Order). The company provides email continuity solutions, employee notification services, and automated email recovery management.
MessageOne grew out of MSP Technologies — a professional services’ firm — which specialised in managing and monitoring large corporations’ distributed Microsoft Exchange systems. MSP Technologies had developed and deployed MessageView for clients such as Motorola, Siemens, DuPont, and Insignia. MessageView is a real-time email monitoring and reporting solution that was developed to manage and monitor traffic among globally distributed MS Exchange 5.5 and 2000 email servers. It competed with products from NetIQ, BMC, and IBM’s Tivoli division.
MessageView customers began demanding a different kind of service: “Don’t just monitor our email for us — that’s a predictive service, like vitamins. We need something stronger for the pain of emergencies — more like morphine. Give us an alternative email service we can migrate to in an emergency. It needs to be a fast-acting, low-cost, safety net solution; not a high-priced, full-blown, mirrored backup that costs an arm and a leg to maintain. Price it more like an insurance policy than like a fully mirrored backup system.” That was the spec for what became EMS.

What’s MessageOne’s EMS?
On October 14, 2003, MessageOne announced Version 3.0 of its Linux-based EMS. It’s a secure, standby messaging and employee notification system. It is hosted at the disaster recovery facility of your choice (you can choose from IBM, SunGard, or HP).
ENVIRONMENTS SUPPORTED. With Version 3.0, MessageOne now offers email continuity for both Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes as well as guaranteed message-forwarding support for RIM Blackberry and for other wireless devices. MessageOne’s email service is actually email-agnostic. It can also be used as a backup for GroupWise, iPlanet, and other email systems. (Many organisations use multiple email platforms.)

How EMS Works
PRIOR TO ACTIVATION. MessageOne installs EMS replication software on your company’s server inside your firewall. Your email directory and distribution lists, as well as specified email folders (critical employees’ contact files, calendars, mission-critical work-in-progress) are automatically replicated at predefined intervals to a functionally equivalent but structurally different email service that resides at a hosted disaster recovery facility.
WHEN EMAIL CAN’T GET THROUGH. Once your EMS is armed and ready, it can spring into action on your behalf even before you know that it needs to be activated. (See Illustration 2.) So, for example, if there’s a Denial of Service Attack on your server that blocks incoming email, or if your email server is down for a few minutes, EMS will automatically store and forward any incoming email. EMS doesn’t bounce the incoming email back to the senders but rather stores it and tries to forward it on to your corporate email service. So, if your email service comes right back up, you’ll receive the stored and forwarded email, and no sender will know you had a temporary glitch.
UPON ACTIVATION. If there’s a real email emergency — outage or extended downtime — the backup email service can be activated by a phone call or via Web self-service by authorised employees. Once activated, EMS broadcasts alerts to your employees via their cell phones, pagers, and/or alternate email addresses (e.g., AOL, Yahoo, etc.), notifying them that EMS has been activated and providing them with pre-arranged logon instructions (using your authentication mechanism of choice: the same passwords, different passwords, SecureID, etc.).
EMS automatically routes all external and internal email sent to corporate addresses to the secure 128-bit SSL EMS system hosted at your disaster recovery host.
TESTING. The backup email service can be tested as often as you like, using a self-service Web-based activation program.

User Interface and Functionality
For end users who are accustomed to accessing email using rich email clients and synchronising their offline and online email boxes in the background, it will be a rude awakening to have to rely solely on browser-based email access. When your end users switch to the browser-based email client that is provided with the EMS solution, they won’t find the richness in functionality they normally experience with their Outlook or Lotus Notes email clients.
EMS provides a bare bones email client with basic email functionality (send, receive, copy, and forward email with attachments). In an emergency, however, most employees are grateful to have any email access, and they’ll gladly sacrifice rich functionality in favour of real-time access to their email. We don’t recommend this approach for prolonged email usage (more than a week or two); it’s fine for a few days.
The most important aspect of functionality has to do with whether or not employees can easily gain access to the critical context they need in order to respond to emails. It’s important to remember that you’re not just dealing with email handling, you also need to think about directories, distribution lists, contacts, work-in-progress folders, and calendars. Moving your employees over to a “virgin inbox” can be very unsettling. Most workers will need some context in order to carry on without disruption.
CARRYING THE CONTEXT ALONG. The extent to which you can offer employees’ a relatively seamless transition to their emergency backup email platform on EMS depends on the care you take ahead of time in deciding which directories and folders should be replicated for which groups of employees. For example, salespeople and client executives will need access to their contact lists as well as to email folders with current work-in-process. Executives and managers will need access to their distribution lists as well as to their project files. Administrative assistants will need access to group calendars.
It’s neither realistic nor cost-effective to synchronise all your email folders all the time. It is a good idea to selectively replicate your directories, your distribution lists, and your group calendars. Whether or not you replicate contacts, and which critical folders to replicate, will depend on your organisation’s priorities.
Unfortunately, it will be impossible to guess correctly about which folders any individual or group of employees will be likely to need. Most of us simply don’t plan ahead for contingencies, and many important client projects ebb and flow with alarming alacrity. It may therefore be difficult to anticipate precisely which email folders will be most urgently needed during an emergency.

Competitive Landscape
MessageOne divides its competitors into three categories of solutions. There are high-end replication, mirroring, and clustering solutions for high availability from vendors such as EMC. There are mid-range replication solutions used for traditional backup and recovery. These include replication solutions from companies like NSI, Veritas, and Legato. And, there are new suppliers of replication services at the lower end of the scale, such as Evergreen Assurance and Electric Mail. MessageOne’s EMS is positioned at the low end of the cost spectrum, yet it offers virtually instant fail over with email functionality that is good enough to keep your customers happy and your employees productive.
We predict that there will be a number of similar on-demand email continuity solutions that emerge, based on similar (Linux/Open Source) building blocks. We recommend, however, that you evaluate the track record and the expertise of the firms offering these solutions and, of course, make sure you get references from companies that have already used these solutions to weather significant outages.
In conclusion, e-mail is essential to your business. Don’t get caught without a proven email continuity solution. The good news is that affordable, pragmatic solutions such as MessageOne’s EMS are becoming available precisely at the time in which our corporate email systems are coming under frequent attacks.

Patricia B Seybold is the founder — CEO of Patricia Seybold Group in Boston and is a well-known customer guru and best-selling author. She has a working arrangement with Innovative Media for various customer-related initiatives for India and Middle East.

She may be contacted at imedia@vsnl.com.