Improve Your Email Continuity with Archiving Solutions

Email is critical for most corporate communications, so email server downtime after hardware failure can severely impact employee productivity. Customers receiving an error message when sending communications to a business might lose trust in that business, so email services must remain steady to support brand reputation. For customer trust, brand reputation, and employee productivity, businesses must configure a failover service for their email systems. Administrators can implement failover using an email continuity system that supports data recovery and continued communications while troubleshooting and remedying server downtime.

What is Email Continuity?

You’re probably aware of the importance of business continuity. Business continuity is a list of procedures and practices that keep organizations productive and generate revenue. Threats can affect business continuity, including cyber threats, catastrophic natural disasters (e.g., flood or fire), physical theft, or fraud. Businesses set up various safety nets, policies, and defenses to stop these threats so that they can continue to be productive.

Email continuity has the same general focus to ensure that your business stays productive, except it focuses on one component of productivity – your organizational digital communication. The loss of your email servers could damage communications and cause data loss from external sources and internal messages. Most organizations have backup servers to act as a failsafe in case of hardware failure, so email continuity works the same way by providing a failsafe for your digital communications.

Catastrophic failure isn’t an issue you can foresee, but you can take steps to deal with it should it happen. You won’t necessarily need email continuity procedures, but having the right system saves your organization money and reduces stress if your email server fails. The best email continuity plans prepare for possible server failure and make the switchover from the production server to the failsafe server seamless for users.

Without email continuity, you could lose communication channels for hours before administrators can return the system to normal. After repairing the hardware failure, administrators must still move backup data from storage to the production environment. For large organizations, file recovery can take hours when potentially millions of email files and terabytes of data must be transferred. Cloud-based solutions allow for speedy transfers, but even the most optimized disaster recovery solution can take hours for large data transfers.

How Email Archiving Solutions for Continuity Work

To have a secure failsafe, you need a system immediately taking over while administrators continue to work on the original email system. The process must be seamless so that users do not notice any failures in their email delivery. Having a secure, seamless failsafe is easier said than done, and much of the overhead and stress relies on the efficiency of your chosen email continuity solution.

A good example of email vulnerability is phishing. A phishing attack can lead to ransomware injection, affecting files across the entire business environment. Ransomware encrypts your files and holds them hostage until a payment is made to the attacker. While files are encrypted, users cannot access critical business files delivered by email. Your email system stores files until users decide to delete them or manually remove them from the server.

Usually, email archiving and continuity solutions allow users to continue communicating from a web portal. The web portal connects to the cloud storage where your backups and email archive software runs, so the failsafe system contains a copy of business email messages. Because archived email data is in the cloud and not on-premises, they remain untouched after a ransomware attack. Cloud backups remain untouched in most malware attacks, so it’s often a viable solution in most disaster recovery plans.

After administrators recover the production email system, user connections are returned to their original state. Users can then work with desktop email software again, which usually means they can load Outlook on their desktops and connect to the business email server. The email continuity system only requires users to move to a browser-based email connection while administrators troubleshoot issues and determine the vulnerability. After a data breach, having an email continuity system allows for a more thorough investigation during incident response, and it adds better compliance to your environment, which helps avoid hefty fines for violations.

Any incoming and outgoing messages must be replicated to the production email server, so email messages and their attachments are synchronized with the production server. This step ensures that users do not lose any messages after productivity is returned to the primary server. Email archives remain in the cloud, which can be used again should administrators deal with another server crash.

Benefits of Email Continuity

Aside from business continuity after an email system failure, configuring a failsafe for your environment has several other benefits, mainly for administrators responsible for data protection and disaster recovery. By reducing overhead for administrators, businesses preserve their technology budgets and minimize downtime and revenue loss after a catastrophic failure.

A few additional benefits of email continuity systems:

• Synchronized data between your primary email server and your backup archive storage.
• Employees have continual access to important files and messages, preserving their regular workflows and productivity.
• Improved compliance, especially with regulations requiring continuity and disaster recovery plans.
• Protection from phishing when all three layers of your central cybersecurity (e.g., email quarantines and scans, security awareness training, and antivirus software) fail and cause a data breach.
• Reduced stress placed on administrators responsible for disaster recovery and returning the email server to its original state.
• Lower impact on revenue when the email system fails.
• Better support for users, especially those with critical corporate roles who must finish a project on a deadline.

Incorporating Email Archives with Business Continuity

An email archive is a full copy of all messages and their file attachments, making it one of the best business continuity products for a corporate environment. You might not realize the importance of email until your email system fails. Most businesses do not realize the importance of failover until they experience catastrophic failure of one of their primary productivity servers. All files and saved messages are unavailable to users instantly when an email server fails, so it should be a part of your failover plans. You probably have a backup and failover in case of a database failure, and email systems are just as critical as your production database environment.

The ArcTitan file archiving solution is an email continuity application that can help you support seamless communication with customers and other employees after a catastrophic failure. It’s a cloud-based storage solution, so businesses save money on their archiving solution and scale storage capacity as more data is stored during the backup process. ArcTitan is easily configured, and administrators can set permissions to data. For example, if legal counsel needs access to data for investigations, administrators can give permission only to the data necessary for review and discovery.

Email archiving solutions help with compliance, including GDPR. Most corporations know that GDPR requires companies to delete data at a consumer's request. It’s a European regulation, but other corporations follow GDPR requirements to continue providing services for European consumers. Without GDPR, businesses can keep data indefinitely and don’t need to alert users to the sale of their data. GDPR gives consumers more control over their data, so businesses must be able to find and delete a consumer’s data upon request.