Correspondence is one of the most important aspects of the business process. A good business should have the lines of communication open. This will not only develop a certain level of confidence in your clients, but is will also ensure that they keep your services in a competitive market. You do not want to be losing clients because of breakdown in communication, and this is why email continuity exists.

You may have the most efficient systems in place and the best staff working closely with your clientele, but disaster always picks the most unexpected times to strike. Just when you are about to make the sale of the year, your business server may just crash, leaving you with no means to adequately communicate as you look to finalize that million-dollar deal.

The loss of email services may not only affect communication, but various other things as well. Scores of documents are sent and received through email, including calendars, group work and other data that are crucial to keep projects running. Email continuity is therefore a necessity and not just another feature, for a business that intends to compete and satisfy clients.

According to research, a company has a 70% chance of email server failure on average, and majority of the time, the outage may last more then four hours. More than four hours is a lot of time for a business. It is the amount of time that it may take to lose a few hundred clients, translating to thousands and even millions of dollars in profits.

Some of the major causes of email outage include failure of the data center due to power failures, exchange directory failure, hardware failure and problems with internet connectivity. This is not counting the chance that a natural disaster may force you to abandon your business premises. With a reliable email continuity strategy, emails should be accessible through any internet connection.

Email continuity keeps you running where exchange backup cannot. An exchange backup enables a business to recover all its data, including email and other applications. Backup allows your business to recover email, but it does not provide email continuity. The time it will take to restore the email server from an exchange backer could last anywhere between a few hours to several days. During this time, business process is at a standstill.

One of the ways that some businesses deal with this problem is to switch to personal email accounts of the staff. However, this means that the company loses the communication control that it enjoys. Email continuity, however, leaves no such breathing room.

Email continuity is designed to resume the email service within minutes of the outage. This should be so much so that email users will barely notice that there is a problem. As such, it is therefore impertinent that part of your business strategy is to ensure that you get email continuity services, and not just backup. Those few hours may negatively affect your company and give your competition the advantage they have been looking for.