Messaging News - October 2008 - (Page 18)

DISASTER RECOVERY an offering is not really. However, it means different things to different people,” says Osterman. “True disaster recovery is where you have a redundant data center, or back up appliances like Teneros or NeverFail, and where you can actually immediately fail over or something like Dell MessageOne, giving you a back up email capability that’s offsite, should a hurricane come through or an outage occur.” Osterman goes on to say he thinks companies can be somewhat misled into thinking that they have a disaster recovery solution, when the one that they have implemented themselves may not be up to snuff. “They say, ‘We have disaster recovery because we have backup tapes,’ but what happens if those tapes are stored in the same building that you are locked out of because of an emergency?” He adds that some companies consider a solution to be that same set of backup tapes stored remotely somewhere, presumably so if something did go wrong they could set up new servers and upload the data to get back up and running within a day. “Disaster recovery comes in many flavors but true disaster recovery is where you are back up and running within a few minutes. If you’re out a day or two or three without email, it could be very damaging.” MB/TMP Choosing a Disaster Recovery Solution We asked our experts for their opinion on how to evaluate a disaster recovery solution. “The first thing you need to do is take a look at how reliant you are on your network and on email,” advises Michael Osterman, principal of Osterman Research. “If you’re using email just for communication purposes, simple transport, that kind of thing, you could go to a back up email system—and we’re talking about internal mail only—and still maintain a lot of that functionality. It’s not a very good way to do it, but you could do it and your company could still function sort of normally.” Osterman goes on to say, “If you have a lot of customer facing communication, if you’re doing transactions, receiving orders, etc., via email, then disaster recovery means a very different thing. It means that if your email system goes down, you stop getting orders, customer emails start bouncing back and it damages your reputation.” Osterman thinks the second thing to consider is what is the likelihood of a natural disaster? “If you’re in the middle of the U.S. your likelihood of a disaster is not that high,” says Osterman. “There’s not that many bad things that can happen to you outside of a power outage from a blizzard or something like that. If you’re in Florida, then you’ve got a reasonable chance every year that there’s going to be two or three hurricanes so close to the state, that your power will be knocked out for a week.” Andrea Skov, chief marketing officer at Teneros recommends that the solution be reviewed carefully, “Everybody and their brother is suddenly trying to get into disaster recovery risk—internal threats and external threats—and they’re not thinking through the requisites of the market.” Ben Petro, CEO of Teneros adds, “Companies should ensure that the solutions they are considering provide both local high availability and remote disaster recovery to protect against local technology failures or site-wide outages—providing immediate business continuity and data access, preventing workflow and operational losses.” He recommends that organizations choose disaster recovery solutions that back up MS Exchange and support all elements of the MS Exchange ecosystem such as the Blackberry Enterprise Server. “Look at the solution vendor’s roadmap for MS Exchange 2003 and 2007 and their plan for 2010— be sure the vendor secures your messaging platform—wherever Microsoft is going.” Lastly, says Petro, “Assure that the vendor offers a holistic solution to MS Exchange backup, failover, protection, and delivery, keeping end-users seamlessly connected to and fully operational on email.” According to Paul D’Arcy, director of marketing for Dell MessageOne, organizations need to figure out how they want to allocate their resources and what’s important to them. “Usually they start by figuring out two things—what needs to happen during an outage or disaster? Is it okay to have downtime or do they want to make sure that they’ve got protection that keeps their key systems and business processes going? Secondly, how do they make sure they don’t have data loss and that they can fix anything that breaks afterwards?” Alan Elliott, vice president of sales and marketing for Mirapoint, believes vendors should provide a comprehensive plan that includes software, hardware and a tightly coupled process, and that ideally the plan could be deployed in a turnkey fashion, leaving little room for error. “From a systems perspective the solution should have both physical and geographic redundancy, eliminating the chance of a local problem taking down your business. The concepts of disaster recovery and mission critical are inextricably intertwined. Surprisingly, the answers to the disaster recovery challenge are really more about process than technology itself.” MB/TMP FOR YOUR REFERENCE Dell MessageOne www.messageone.com Mirapoint Software, Inc. www.mirapoint.com Osterman Research www.ostermanresearch.com Teneros, Inc. www.teneros.com 18 MESSAGING NEWS OCTOBER 2008 http://www.messageone.com http://www.mirapoint.com http://www.ostermanresearch.com http://www.teneros.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Messaging News - October 2008

Messaging News - October 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes Targeting the Technology-Wise Customer The Insider Threat: The New Era of Disaster Recovery Making Collaboration Tools Pro-Knowledge Sharing Botnets Go Marching On Dissecting Email Forensics Next in Messaging News “On Message” with Ben Gross The World is Not the Center of the Universe, and Filters Don’t Stop Email Spam Making the Case Learn More

Messaging News - October 2008

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