Be it a big business or a small business, emails are indispensable for business organizations. It is hard to imagine a single day without mails in business organizations where everyone relies on them to communicate with one another. Convenience, accessibility, ability to attach a variety of file formats and the obligation to remain to-the-point makes emails an instant favorite for everyone. Moreover, emails have been the industry standard for more than 2 decades and it is hard to get rid of this familiarity. Thus, it is a pretty established fact that business and emails are inseparable.

Now imagine, you are following up a sales pitch for months now and you are about to seal the deal. You have to send your prospective client an important document at 2pm and the company mail server breaks down at 1.30 pm. The IT team tells you that the server won’t be up until 3pm. What’s worse is that your client is very picky about punctuality and you don’t want to make any mistakes at this stage of the pitch. The document you want to send is very confidential for your organization and you can’t risk sending it over a public server from your personal ID. Now what would you do in this situation?

The above-mentioned scenario is in no way an exaggeration. Without emails for even an hour, an entire organization comes to halt. Email servers can break down anytime and sometimes situations are too crucial to afford a break down like this. Rather than repenting during these situations, it is wise that you have email continuity services well in place to avoid such situations. Continuity ensures that you don’t miss out on mail services even when your primary server breaks down. Are you still not convinced that you need email continuity for your organization? Read on.

Benefits of Email Continuity

1. Having a backup

Undoubtedly, the first advantage of having continuity services is that you always have a backup for your primary mail server. You can be rest assured that you won’t miss out on a single mail even if your server goes down because of maintenance issues, lack of resources, short circuits, natural disasters or anything else. Relying too much on their servers and assuming they don’t need email continuity is a mistake most businesses do. But what they don’t realize is mail servers are unpredictable and break down without notice. There are many instances where companies have lost millions because of a single outage. For example, Native American Services Corp once reported that a single mail outage cost them a $73 mn sale.

2. No Maintenance

Email continuity services are normally offered by third party vendors who ensure that a dedicated server is assigned to your organization’s mails. As soon as the primary server goes down, the backup server immediately takes over without you having to do anything. All you need is a stable internet connection to keep the email services running. All maintenance is done by the service provider, while your IT team can focus on your primary server and get it back online.

3. No Hardware/Software Required

While your primary email server is down and you are using the backup server offered by the email continuity service, you wouldn’t need any additional hardware. There is no additional software required either as you will be accessing mails through a browser. You can continue using your present mail ID as the integration is done with your existing mail system. To put it simply, you won’t even know that your primary server is down and there is an email outage at the moment.

4. No Shadow IT

Whenever there is an outage and there is an urgent mail to be sent, it is quite natural that people will use their personal IDs or other alternate mail IDs to send messages and documents. This activity is known as ‘Shadow IT’ and it can be risky as confidential information is shared over a cloud server or a public file sharing platform. You will be leaving a lot of loose ends that might cause a security breach or a data leak. Instead, you can have email continuity and prevent shadows IT from happening.