Email failure more stressful than divorce

A divorce would be less traumatic for IT managers than a weeklong failure of their corporate email system, according to a new study.

The report, sponsored by storage software company Veritas, also found "alarming deficiencies" in email system management and backup and recovery methods.

Almost half of respondents said it takes more than an hour to get the entire email system up and running after unplanned downtime, while one in ten said it takes longer than a day. Just four per cent of IT mangers said it would take less than an hour to restore and 39 per cent could not say how long it would take to restore email systems.

Keeping email systems running is a stressful task for IT managers, according to the study. Properly functioning email systems are so critical that 68 per cent of companies said users get irate within as little as 30 minutes without email access.

Within just 24 hours of email system failure, almost one-fifth of IT managers said their jobs would be on the line. And the study found that for 34 per cent of CIOs and IT managers, a week without a working corporate email system would be more traumatic than events such as a minor car accident, moving to a new home, or getting married or divorced.

Mark Bregman, executive VP for product operations at Veritas, said: "Email has become far more than a communication tool, placing a huge responsibility on organisations to ensure that email is always available. When IT managers fail to keep the systems running, they inhibit the ability of the entire organisation to conduct business." Research firm Dynamic Markets conducted the study, which involved 850 IT managers in corporations across the Europe, the Middle East, South Africa and the US. Earlier this month, research firm The Radicati Group released a study that found while 86 per cent of companies rate email archiving as important only 37 per cent have a formal archiving policy in place. The group said email archiving regulations, along with companies' fears of lawsuits, are pushing the need to archive. The market for email archiving is expected to reach more than $164m by the end of 2003 and grow to $1.4bn by 2007, according to The Radicati Group.

The Veritas report found that although 99 per cent of companies said they back up email and attachments, 56 per cent have at least some of their email locations excluded from automated backup. And although 39 per cent of respondents thought e mail could be used as legal evidence for or against their company, 46 per cent said it would be difficult to locate and retrieve a particular email on the system if it was requested. While almost all of the companies surveyed claimed to have the ability to recover emails, but only 18 per cent said they could recover emails from further back than a year. Thirty per cent said they could recover back only to one month, and 11 per cent said the previous week was as far back as they could go.

Ed Frauenheim writes for CNET News.com