(14-Feb-10) Like it or not, email outages are a business reality. A recent ApplicationContinuity.org survey revealed that, despite advances in data-backup, archiving and protection technology, companies of all sizes remain vulnerable to costly and damaging email outages. In fact, data from a recent Dell MessageOne survey demonstrated that in any given 12-month time period, there is a 75 percent likelihood of an unplanned email outage and a 14 percent likelihood of a planned email outage for any given company.

The length of email outages in the companies surveyed ranged from a minimum of two minutes to a maximum of 120 hours, with the average outage lasting 32.1 hours. Although the majority of the outages lasted less than 24 hours, 43 percent of them lasted longer than 24 hours, a length of time that can lead to significant business disruption and damage. The causes for these outages ranged from storage-area-network failures and losses in network access to database corruption and viruses. And there’s no discounting the damages, from disgruntled customers to lost revenue.