Why Email Fails: Dell MessageOne Survey of Email Outages

Overview

While there is no argument that email is a mission-critical application for businesses today, email continues to fail, and fail frequently. Despite large enterprise investments in replication, mirroring, and tape back up systems, business have a 75% chance of losing email for a significant duration at least once a year. Many experience multiple email failures every year. While it is widely known that natural and man-made disasters can lead to email outages, data in this comprehensive study shows that email systems are more frequently brought down by a variety of technological and IT systems failures.

MessageOne, a leading provider of email continuity solutions, commissioned this research report to understand the frequency, severity, and cause of email outages in North American corporations using Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. This research shows that enterprise email systems are prone to a variety of potential breakdowns including SAN (Storage Area Network) failures, mis-configuration, losses in network access, database corruption, and viruses. This research report analyzes the leading causes of failure with enterprise email systems and provides preventative guidance to lower the probability of unplanned email outages.