As the readers of this blog already know, email has become business critical for most companies. That means even the slightest disruption or delay in email delivery or problems with employees’ access to their mailboxes have significant impact on worker productivity and a company’s bottom line.

Most organizations that maintain their own internal messaging infrastructure have already invested in a number of different backup and fail-over systems that reduce the risk of prolonged outages. These systems typically consist of clustered mail servers and mass-storage devices, backup power and redundant network connectivity.

But what about external dependencies?

Contingency planning is becoming increasingly complex, as more and more businesses rely on external solution providers for their electronic messaging infrastructure. These services are provided in form of complete outsourcing of enterprise email and IM, hosted security & anti-spam gateway filtering solutions, and mobile messaging networks, to name just a few. Of course, the Internet itself is the most critical backbone of it all.
In recent weeks we have witnessed a number of incidents that made me wonder how many companies are actually prepared for infrastructure disruptions that are outside of their direct control.

What do you do when your company’s Internet connectivity is disrupted for days?

How does your field work force cope when mobile messaging goes down?

It is well worthwhile to include these and similar scenarios in a corporate contingency plan.

…or you can have a different outlook altogether, compliments of The Onion

Technorati Tags: internet outage, email disruption, RIM outage

If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. An RSS Subscription will deliver new Blog posts automatically to your computer.
Thanks for visiting!