Is Corporate Email a Mission Critical Service?

Posted February 15th, 2008 by Jonah Paransky

Often the requirement for uptime and availability is placed in the context of the mission criticality of an IT service in general.

Examples of IT services and perceived mission criticality:

Real-time transaction processing system at a major financial services firm with millions of dollars of transactions per minute – clearly mission critical
E-commerce system responsible for a significant portion of corporate revenue – clearly mission critical
Remote command and control networks that control the flow of power through the grid – clearly mission critical
Voice communication services – the classic example of “mission critical”, the expectation for always on service was first used for voice phone service
Corporate e-mail – that’s a hard one. Let’s analyze more deeply…

So is corporate email access a mission critical service?

If we evaluated it in the same way we would evaluate any other IT service or business application, we would look to evaluate the top questions about the cost of downtime.

(Photo Credit: Flickr)

How much revenue would be lost due to unplanned downtime?
How many IT staff hours would be lost due to unplanned downtime?
How is organizational productivity impacted due to the unplanned downtime?
Is my organizational reputation damaged due to the unplanned downtime?

We can also use a recent incident of unplanned downtime to help us understand the answer to the question. On Monday, February 11th many users of Research In Motion’s Blackberry service suffered a several hour service outage. Coverage of the outage was pervasive in the traditional media (check out the New York Times coverage as a prime example).

What was the reaction like on-line?

InfoWorld quotes Gartner in suggesting that companies who view email as mission critical should consider other providers
Data Center Knowledge looks at reactions across analysts
ReadWriteWeb suggests “insourcing” the email resources
The woot! blog made suggestions for how to prepare for the next outage
CNET News discusses how the CEO played down the outage
Our friends at the Buzz Bin view this as an example of bad corporate communication in action
CyberNet suggests that users will go somewhere else for their email
FutureLawyer shares a post from Palm citing the reasons Palm is better
Crackberry.com was surprised by the apparent lack of a solid business continuity plan on RIM’s part to ensure reasonable connectivity
I4U News presents a piece from Reuters stating that Blackberry could suffer severe “icon status” damage after this outage

What caused the outage?

This outage, like so many others, seemed to have been caused by a change to the software infrastructure. This should not be surprising, since our research on change management maturity, testing maturity as well as on the causes of downtime show that changes to software infrastructure are the leading cause of downtime.

So what are the lessons learned from this outage? Here are the four major points from our perspective:

Based on the reaction to the most recent mobile messaging outage, end users clearly feel that email access is a mission critical, always on IT service. If your internally managed email system goes down, it may not make the New York Times, but your business and users will be negatively impacted.
If you are an outsourced infrastructure provider, the stakes are immeasurably higher. In a previous blog post, we discussed how Web 2.0 demands more availability. This requirement for greater uptime applies not only to web 2.0 organizations, but all outsourced infrastructure providers.
If you are evaluating outsourcing an application, IT service or software infrastructure, read the top 4 questions to ask your Outsourced infrastructure provider about uptime and availability.
As this example shows, invest to find a better way to understand the impact of changes to your software infrastructure. As a provider of IT services or infrastructure, you don’t want to be stuck in the unfortunate middle.