April 2007 - How to Prepare for and Survive an E-mail Disaster with InstantReplay™

From its humble beginnings, e-mail has evolved into a mission critical corporate communications tool. This fact hit home late last week when Blackberry customers experienced delays and service interruptions with their popular mobile e-mail devices.

While it garnered most of the press, RIM wasn't the only e-mail vendor to experience problems last week. Flying under most radar screens were service issues including lengthy e-mail delays at two major hosted antispam providers.

XPMsoftware has been working on a product to provide additional protection in the event of any e-mail service outage. InstantReplay™ is a PerfectMail add on product designed to ensure you don't miss a single message even if your mail server fails.

Disaster Preparedness

As guardians of corporate data and IT services, system administrators play a critical role in data protection and availability. Part of that responsibility includes preparing for IT disasters.

Normal disaster recovery follows a simple and effective road map:

1. Ensure all hardware is covered by an onsite hardware maintenance warranty.
2. Purchase and install server operating system backup agents
3. Purchase and install application software back up agents (such as MS Exchange™ agents)
4. Keep backups readily available but off site
5. Plan for and thoroughly test recovery procedures

While needs differ, the above procedures are more than sufficient for most applications. But, they are not at all sufficient for e-mail.

E-mail's Unique Backup Requirements

E-mail is a 24 by 7 application. E-mail is mission critical in that your organizations ability to conduct business, service customers, etc. depends on e-mail. If your e-mail service fails, critical information may be lost.

There are two key problems unique to e-mail that are not addressed by traditional e-mail back up solutions:

1. Do I continue to receive e-mails while my server is down?
2. How do I recover messages received after my most recent back up that were lost when my mail server failed?

Receiving Messages During an E-mail Disaster

If your mail server is protected with PerfectMail you need not worry about the first problem!

PerfectMail contains an e-mail delivery queue. PerfectMail accepts inbound messages and queues them for up to a week whenever it cannot contact protected mail server(s). Typically, PerfectMail can queue 10-50+GB of inbound e-mail (more than sufficient for most organizations).

Once your mail server is back on-line, PerfectMail will automatically deliver messages. Consequently, your e-mail peers will never know you experienced an e-mail service outage.

E-mails Lost After Back Up

Most back up tools make nightly back ups. E-mails received after your nightly back up cycle completes are not backed up until the next night. If there is a failure during the day, those messages are lost.

This will result in the loss of critical messages that you have read but to which you have not yet responded. If these messages are lost, customer inquiries (and the business opportunities they represent) are permanently lost.

You could e-mail your peers and ask them to resend but...

• You may not remember everyone who mailed you, and
• You probably don't want them to know you had a failure.

Instant E-mail Message Recovery with InstantReplay™

InstantReplay™ from XPMsoftware is an add-on E-Mail Disaster Recovery tool for PerfectMail antispam solutions. InstantReplay adds the final critical step to your company's e-mail disaster recovery strategy by letting you

Recover those critical message received after your e-mail server back up completed

PerfectMail InstantReplay leverages the e-mail message archive built into every PerfectMail solution. PerfectMail's e-mail archive is a copy of every message received by PerfectMail over the last 7 to 30 days.

InstantReplay works by resending (to your mail server) every message from the time your server failed to the time it is put back into service. With InstantReplay, you are guaranteed that no messages are lost and e-mail peers need never know you experienced an outage.

InstantReplay is easy and flexible. Through a simple web interface, Administrators can select start and end times along with domains requiring recovery. Typically, e-mail messages are re-delivered in minutes. This makes InstantReplay the missing link in your E-mail Disaster Recovery strategy.

Look for our official product announcement shortly or contact us now to learn more about how InstantReplay™ can help you protect your e-mail infrastructre.

Our e-mail newsletters are intended to provide information of interest to people involved with e-mail security and protection. This newsletter could be perceived as having more of a marketing slant because it talks about a new product that is unique to XPMsoftware and PerfectMail

I decided to use our monthly newsletter to announce the immediate availability of InstantReplay because it meets an immediate and critical need in corporate e-mail disaster preparedness.

Your comments are always welcome. For personal attention, please forward any comments to the author.

Regards,

Larry Karnis

________________

I hope you found this article useful. My intent is to help organizations understand, assess and effectively defend against e-mail threats. I would like to receive your thoughts on this article. Please direct your comments by e-mail to Larry Karnis.

© 2007 by Larry Karnis and XPMsoftware. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to quote from this article in whole or in part, or to reproduce this article by any means as long as the the author and XPMsoftware receive appropriate attribution.

About the Author

Larry Karnis is the president of XPMsoftware, the developer of PerfectMail Antispam and Antivirus products and services. Larry has spent the last 7 years focused on e-mail security best practices and e-mail security solutions. Before that, Larry worked as an IT infrastructure and security consultant, software engineer with multiple commercial products to his credit. Larry has also worked as a professional IT trainer for VMware, RedHat, Global Knowledge and Learning Tree.

Comments on this article should be directed to lkarnis@xpmsoftware.com.