Two-Thirds of UK Firms Lack Confidence in Their Ability to Recover Microsoft Exchange

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced survey results that revealed the risks that enterprises face when retaining, protecting and recovering vital email data. IT executives from some of the world’s largest corporations in financial, retail, media and manufacturing participated in the Mimosa sponsored survey.

The findings of the independent survey carried out by Mimosa Systems at Infosec 2008, revealed the critical need for storage optimization, rapid information access, discovery, compliance and recovery. Two-thirds of respondents lack confidence in their ability to completely recover their Microsoft Exchange servers in the event of a failure or disaster. Unsurprisingly, the research also found that business continuity and disaster recovery were one of the main IT drivers for implementing an email archiving solution. The survey comprised of end users, IT managers and IT companies discovered that IT departments in most UK firms were taking many hours to recover a failed Microsoft Exchange server, leaving most employees without their most critical business application for almost a third of their working day.

Brian Bennett, managing director of Mimosa Systems UK, said: "Email has become the most pervasive business application of the decade, and Microsoft Exchange is by far the most popular choice for UK businesses. As companies put more and more critical data onto their Exchange servers the greater their need to ensure they have a robust and rapid recovery plan in place."

In addition, the survey identified that the responsibility of recovering individual emails, either lost or accidentally deleted, still falls squarely onto the shoulders of the IT manager, with 75 percent of firms surveyed confirming that employees lack the ability to search and recover from email archives without IT support. Recovering lost or deleted emails remains a highly time-intensive task, with IT departments claiming they take, on average, more than five hours to manually search and recover a single email.

Bennett concludes: "Adding an extra layer of resiliency into Microsoft Exchange is a must for UK businesses; IT departments need to offer their organisation complete confidence in their ability to restore email immediately, and in its entirety, or risk the consequences."