How Does Email Archiving Help With Disaster Recovery?

In the event of a disaster, every business must keep company operations running and recover quickly from the event. This is known as business continuity.

Business continuity and disaster recovery are vital processes a company must do in the event of a disaster. The way to achieve both is down to a well-planned business continuity plan, alongside a disaster recovery that happens before a crisis can occur.

While most businesses want to avoid disaster, problems will always occur. Without an effective plan in place, you could be caught off guard. Every business owner knows that unscheduled downtime, systems outages and failure can lead to loss of clients and diminishing profits. By having a business continuity plan and discovery plan working in tandem, it will be your insurance policy against the damage of a disaster event.

A vital component of business continuity and recovery is an efficient business-wide email archiving system. This blog will explain how email archiving can help with your disaster recovery.

What is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is the process made to create prevention and recovery systems that deal with potential threats to an organisation. The core aim of a BCP is to ensure operations are back up and running before and during the execution of the disaster recovery plan.

Every business continuity plan should include:

• An impact analysis
• Business continuity plans and strategy

What is a disaster recovery plan?

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a set of policies, tools and procedures that enable a business to recover its technology infrastructure and systems following downtime caused by internal errors or by an external data breach.

Every disaster recovery plan should include:

• Incident response
• Damage assessment

Difference between a BCP and a DRP

While both plans may seem similar, BCPs and DRPs are completely different documents. A BCP allows a business to plan in advance how it will deliver essential services during a disaster event. A DRP differs because it enables a company to resume critical systems faster after unplanned downtime. A BCP and a DRP are essential elements of an effective business continuity management system.

What causes system downtime?

The leading causes for a system to have some downtime includes:

• Power supply failure
• Human error
• Cyber attack (Such as phishing, ransomware, malware)
• IT equipment failures
• Weather-related disasters
• Usage spikes

Cyber criminals are known to have found sophisticated ways to capture business data, meaning businesses must have BCPs and DRPs in place to mitigate risks to third parties. Without sufficient data security, hackers can easily steal sensitive information.

Certain issues are out of your control, such as power outages and any natural related event. Events such as human error can be avoided if the right training is put in place. Whatever causes your downtime, any data loss can damage your company’s reputation and profits.

What makes for an effective BCP or DRP?

While your BCP and DRP are different, both plans should be scalable and reliable in their ability to recover vital business information in minutes. Both plans should also provide appropriate monitoring and support across the business.

Some businesses turn to email archiving solutions as part of their disaster recovery to support in mitigating the damage caused by the downtime. Email archiving solutions are reliable, fast and scalable services that suit every size of business. An important element of your BCP is to provide the necessary tools to store and salvage crucial data so your employees can carry on with their daily operations.

How does email archiving work?

The average office worker sends 40 emails a day while receiving 121 communications a day. The huge volume of incoming and outgoing emails clogs up the company server which can limit operations. In a bigger business, it can be difficult to monitor emails your staff are deleting which could contain essential information and leave you in breach of compliance regulations.

An email archive automatically saves all company emails and places them on a separate server that is usually based off site. This allows a business to preserve all business critical information in archived emails without the need to sacrifice server speeds.

Email archiving is also needed in the event of litigation or an eDiscovery request is made. Any business under litigation must produce accurate and intact email records. If a business fails to produce this information, it can be fined or prosecuted. Even if you’ve previously stored your email data – using legal holds or downloading .pst files – without an email archiving solution in place, that data could be lost. Only with email archiving software in place can your business meet compliance requirements and be properly prepared for disruption.

Email archiving and disaster recovery

Email archiving can support businesses through two key disaster recovery processes.

Network disaster recovery

Email archiving solutions support businesses during a network outage because they store communication data in an off-site email server. This means that if your primary system is down, your teams can still access and retrieve emails through the off-site server on any device.

Emergency management

With ransomware and spyware attacks being such a common threat these days, companies must know exactly how to protect all data from cyber criminals. With an email archive stored on an off-site server, vendors such as Cryoserver encrypt all critical data and have the appropriate security measures in place to prevent attacks. Businesses can carry on as usual and rest assured that sensitive information is being protected.

If you’re looking to add email archiving to your data recovery strategy, Cryoserver has the solution to suit every need. Our cloud-based email archiving solutions are compliant with every industry standard and can be implemented into any current email system such as Office 365. If you’re looking to migrate to the cloud, Cryoserver can also support this. Get in touch to get started.