Email Continuity
Business Email Continuity Requirement
Email is an integral part of conducting business today. With the increasing importance of email, even the slightest disruption in service can have significant financial impact on a business. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2007, 75% of Global 2000 companies will have emergency notification systems for employee communication as part of disaster recovery plans in the event of a crisis. Because email is a mission critical part of an organization’s communication infrastructure, disaster recovery for email systems must be a standard requirement rather than an afterthought.
Incidents to Consider
Loss of email data can result from the accidental deletion of individual messages to the physical destruction of a datacenter through natural or manmade disasters. Regardless of the cause, the loss of this data must be quickly rectified to minimize the impact on the organization’s operations. Mirapoint’s secure messaging appliances are built to minimize data loss on your email system by providing you with a variety of methods to backup and recover lost data at different levels of granularity.
Mirapoint Offers the Following Solutions for Business Continuity:
You can preserve individual messages or mailboxes which are useful in the cases of accidental deletion of a messages or theft of a user's computer. However in the case of hardware or software failures or some natural disaster, further measures must be taken to recover the entire system. Under such circumstances, Mirapoint offers an appliance that allow customers to continue their email service from a remote site.
Cold Backup
Loss of all or part of an email store is obviously a critical event. Restoring an entire email store from individual messages is generally not practical because of the sheer number of messages and mailboxes. For this reason, taking periodic “snapshots” of the email store (“cold backups”) along with incremental backups (i.e. recording just the changes from the last backup) is the most effective way to keep a relatively up-to-date backup of your email system. Sending these backup images to an off-site and secure facility accompanied by an SLA (Service Level Agreement) on the return of data generally guarantees that email data will always be backed up and in a secure location ready for when disaster strikes. This solution is inexpensive and appropriate for the majority of organizations. Mirapoint appliances support cold and incremental backups of their email stores.
Figure 1 - Cold Backup
Wide Area Site Replication
Enterprises with exceptionally time-sensitive email requirements - as with many financial, healthcare or government organizations - may need an off-site replicated storage area network (SAN) that is synchronized with (“shadows”) the data on the local store. This “hot backup” solution can limit data loss to less than five minutes. Should a disaster occur, less than an hour is required to restore users’ access to email data. In order to meet the stringent needs of customers requiring such a solution, Mirapoint appliances also support wide area replication of mail stores.
Figure 2 - Wide Area Site Replication
Customized Solutions
Within the confines of the two methods suggested above are an array of data redundancy methodologies. These methods allow organizations to replicate what they need immediately and to use a cold backup for the rest of the data, therefore reducing the overall total cost of ownership (TCO) of their disaster recovery solution. Such solutions are inevitably custom since they are determined by the requirements of the organization.
Case Study of a Custom Solution
CHALLENGE:
A diversified technology, media and financial services company with customers in more than 100 countries and more than 300,000 employees worldwide needed a disaster recovery solution they could depend on. Reliability and low TCO were the driving factors in the decision.
SOLUTION:
Mirapoint split the mail stream to copy the meta data (that is, the users and groups) for the primary mail system to the backup mail server. Before sending messages to the backup mail store they were scanned for spam and viruses to prevent storing unwanted messages. This setup allows end users to continue to send and receive mail immediately following a disaster, but no historical data is available. Since there is no-one to organize the data, the organization further elected to only keep the last 30 days worth of data to provide somewhat of a historical context to message.
RESULT:
The operating cost of the disaster recovery infrastructure is optimized to fit the needs of the organization. They have a recovery solution that is immediately activated upon a disaster. They are optimizing the mail store by not backing up junk messages and by electing to use the auto-expire option they don’t have to assign a dedicated resource to handle this tedious task.
Figure 3 - Custom Solution Example
Integrated Mirapoint Disaster Recovery Solution
The cost of a disaster recovery system is essentially a function of two variables: the amount of data lost and the amount of time it takes to restore saved data. The more data which must be backed up and the quicker it must be restored the more expensive the disaster recovery solution will be. Regardless of your organization’s size or backup requirements, Mirapoint has an email disaster recovery solution that will meet your needs. Mirapoint appliances support everything from backup of individual messages up to hot standby installations, making your disaster recovery planning that much easier.
Mirapoint’s RazorGate is an award-winning security appliance that incorporates everything you need to ensure the safety of your network - all in a single, set-it-and-forget-it device. It blocks spam, protects against viruses and hacker attacks, and filters content for both inbound and outbound messages. It is the only stateless message transfer agent in the industry, eliminating local disk requirements and thus preventing email loss, even in case of failure.
Mirapoint’s Message Server showcases the advantages of the appliance model. With Message Server, all the patches, service packs and upgrade decisions that plague other approaches simply go away. The Mirapoint Message Server supports Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) for dependable data backup and storage with no single points of failure. In fact, the Mirapoint Message Server has proven 99.999% availability, based on the actual monitoring of hundreds of deployed Mirapoint systems. Many Mirapoint customers state that their Message Servers have simply never gone down. But eliminating pain is only part of the Message Server story. The Mirapoint Message Server also:
- Scales to millions of users in a single network with centralized administration and management
- Provides a feature rich web-based client and support for Outlook and mobile clients
- Has the industry's lowest TCO and server consolidation advantages
- Employs a hardened operating system that has no known exploits
Customer Testimonials
"The RazorGate 450 offered the Full-Spectrum of email security capabilities that we needed," "and included end-user controls for personalized spam and email management that were attractive." RSA's tech services manager Torsten Guttenberger
RSA Security
“With Mirapoint’s RazorGate email security appliance, we have seen the maximum benefit with the minimum investment.” Fumitaka Kono, JAL’s Director, IT Planning
Japan Airlines
“We found Mirapoint’s appliance approach to email was the best solution for ST in terms of Internet standards–based design, proven reliability and built–in security,” Herve Regad–Pellagru, corporate mail manager
STMicroelectronics
To learn more or to request a free evaluation, call us at (800)937-8118 or email info@mirapoint.com.
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