Business Continuity Planning & Management

What is business continuity?

Business continuity is the ability for an organzation to continue to be productive during a disruptive incident. Business continuity is not only refers to the ability for organizations to continue to produce products and services, but it also refers to the ability for employees to continue to be productive during a disruptive period.

In today's age, email is the backbone of business collaboration and productivity. Mimecast Mailbox Continuity provides simple, cost-effective protection against downtime events, including outages, maintenance, data migration & more.

 

 

What are the three challenges of business continuity?

Email data loss is a risk that every business could face. In fact, nearly all organizations has faced some sort of outage, and without a solution to prevent loss of email, attachments, and calendars, the risk to compliance is even greater. Secondly, Office 365 has limitations; legacy backup solutions are costly and difficult to manage. A better solution leverages your archive data to streamline data backup and recovery. Finally, slow search in business continuity can hamper IT employees and prevent them from getting back to keeping your organization cyber secure.

 

What is business continuity planning?

Business continuity planning protects against planned and unplanned email server outages without the cost and complexity of alternatives. Organizations of all sizes are implementing business continuity plans to ensure employees always have access to crucial email data, keeping employees online and reducing disruptions in productivity. 

 

Why is business continuity planning important?

As organizations move messaging to the cloud, gaps in email protection often emerge, risking data loss and corruption and endangering compliance, continuity and competitiveness. Business continuity solutions can integrate archive, data backup and recovery to offer true protection, helping you resist and rapidly recover from data loss or corruption.

 

Email access is critical to business continuity management

Of all the aspects of business continuity management, ensuring access to email during a planned or unplanned outage must be a top priority.

That’s why, when planning for business continuity management, email disaster recovery must be a huge part of the conversation. Organizations around the globe are turning to Mimecast Mailbox Continuity solutions to keep email flowing and support business continuity management. 

When your business can't afford email downtime, superior business continuity services from Mimecast can help to provide uninterrupted access to live in historic emails, even when primary email servers are down.

Email is indispensable to business. Employees rely on email virtually every waking our, and business communication quickly grinds to a halt when email servers go down. That's why email systems are often the primary target for cyber criminals seeking to wreak havoc or penetrate corporate defenses. It's also why more organizations today turn to business continuity services from Mimecast to make downtime a thing of the past.

 

 

Archiving with business continuity management solutions from Mimecast

Mimecast provides a cloud-based subscription service that delivers all-in-one solutions for email continuity, archiving and security. From best-of-breed protection from targeted threats to easy-to-manage Office 365 compliance archiving, Mimecast provides the tools to simplify all aspects of protecting and managing business email. 

For business continuity management, Mimecast Mailbox Continuity ensures that users have access to email during an outage, an Office 365 outage or planned downtime — without requiring significant capital investments or managing complex redundant systems. 

Mimecast provides uninterrupted access to live and historic email attachments using everyday tools like Outlook for Windows. Employees may continue to send and receive messages on any device from any location. Mimecast’s 100% service availability SLA ensures that business continuity management professionals won’t need to worry about email during a disaster.

 

Business continuity services from Mimecast

Mimecast offers business continuity services as part of an all-in-one subscription service for email continuity, email retention, email security and data backup and recovery. Mimecast Mailbox Continuity provide simple, cost-effective protection against downtime events, including natural disasters, data migration, cloud outages, system failure and planned maintenance. 

Mimecast business continuity services monitor inbound and outbound email from on-premises servers or cloud-based services like Office 365. When a downtime event occurs, administrators can quickly reroute email through the Mimecast Platform, making Mimecast the primary email path. Internal email is captured and retained through journaling, while folders and calendars are replicated and most-used contacts are synced to enable business to operate as usual. Users can access email through Outlook, mobile, web and Mac apps that offer fully functional email capabilities, including access to distribution lists. In addition to continuing to receive live email, users have full access to historical archives through the Mimecast Cloud Archive option, increasing productivity and ensuring archiving compliance. 

Business continuity services from Mimecast help to simplify management of downtime events with tools to monitor, alert and manage inbound and outbound email disruptions. Administrators can rapidly trigger continuity events, while automatic mailbox synchronization lets administrators avoid wasting time on cleanup tasks.

 

Key features of an effective Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

In the event of a sudden email outage or planned downtime, business continuity should provide uninterrupted access to live and historic email and attachments using everyday tools like Outlook for Windows, the web, and mobile applications. Employees should get guaranteed access to email — from anywhere, on any device. And administrators need to be able to monitor email flow, receive alerts, and manage a business continuity event An effective business continuity plan encompasses backup, overflow and repetitive technology solutions. For example, during the pandemic, video conferencing solutions are mission critical and if it fails to operate as normal, one or more other video conferencing or collaboration solutions should be at the ready.

Steps to create a business continuity plan

To create a business continuity plan, CISOs must organize a management team to identify key business areas, critical functions, and to determine how to keep communication moving in the event of planned or unplanned downtime.

 

Benefits of Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

Mimecast supports business continuity management by providing: 

• A seamless end user experience. When email servers or network infrastructure goes down, users can continue to send and receive email from familiar devices. 
• Instant failover and fail back to reduce RPO and RTO for email to nearly zero. 
• Automatic synchronization of mailboxes after a failover event to reduce confusion without placing additional strain on IT teams. 
• Central management of continuity events from a single, web-based console. 
• A solution that deploys quickly with no hardware or software to purchase, reducing cost and lowering IT overhead. 

Learn more about Mimecast solutions for business continuity management, as well as Mimecast data leakage prevention and Outlook email archiving solutions. 

Mimecast business continuity services provide: 

• 100% service availability SLA. 
• Uninterrupted access to all live and historic email and calendar information. 
• Management of downtime events for on-premises, cloud and hybrid email systems. 
• Instant failover and failback, reducing RPO and RTO for email to near zero. 
• Automatic synchronization of mailboxes after downtime events have been resolved, to prevent confusion without requiring intervention from IT. 
• SMS continuity alerts to ensure fast communication between IT and end users. 
• A cloud-based solution with no hardware or software to install, maintain or upgrade. 

Learn more about business continuity services from Mimecast, and about Mimecast solutions for file recovery and for managing email retention requirements.