Business Continuity
Published in CensorNet MailSafe on August 25, 2007 by Administrator
Have you ever wondered what you’d do if your mail server fell over?
On Thursday we had a connectivity failure in the main office. Fortunately, that didn’t cause the loss of any mail. Our mail is hosted at a server located somewhere in the West of London. It just meant that some of my colleagues had to scramble for other means of access in order to obtain their mail. Fortunately, those of us who work outside the office were entirely unaffected.
But I repeat the question. What if your, and let me add our, mail server fell over? In our case we have yet another fallback.
When CensorNet MailSafe is first viewed, people look at it as something that protects one from Spam and Virus attacks, but it is much more than that.
Those of you who have used it are used to the fact that in the event of a false positive (I can count about three in the last nine months personally), you simply log into the portal, locate the trapped mail, release it, and then add a rule to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.
Recently, we added Business Continuity to our list of offerings. If we were to lose our mail server now, we would still be able to read, and reply to, mail that arrived, just so long as we had access to the Internet. We could do this through the same web portal that allows us to release falsely trapped mails.
The portal now gives us a rolling 28 day window on our mail, so this is plenty of time for us to repair our mail server, and in the meantime, business can continue.
Even better, you don’t have to wait for a failure to occur before you make use of the facility. Going on holiday? Well, you can take your laptop, your PDA or even a smart phone with you, but with anti-terrorism checks restricting what you can carry on your flights, it is just sometimes too much trouble to take them with you.
Now, you can just find that Internet Café in downtown wherever, log into the portal, and read your mail. Respond to anything you wish, or just think about what you want to say when you get back. None of this interaction stops you from reading the mail again in the mail client you use at work when you return.
As if that weren’t enough, mail sent through the Business Continuity service will also be archived if you’ve subscribed to our Mail Archiving service, just as if you’d sent the mail directly from your office PC.
If you’re a business, your fiduciary responsibilities probably don’t allow you to not take up the service. If you’re anyone else, just consider how well you could function if mail was denied you.
