Ensure you have email continuity during a Microsoft Office 365 outage
The recent issues with Microsoft Office 365 served as a timely reminder that no system, no matter how robust, is susceptible to failures and downtime.
In this case Microsoft suffered a networking issues in one of its data centres which in turn caused some users to suffer restricted or no access to the platform. This scaled from no access to e-mail through to complete access denial while Microsoft worked to restore the services.
This highlighted for many organisations how critical these systems have become to every day functionality and how a small amount of downtime can have catastrophic effect of the overall function of the business, operationally and financially.
With more and more organisations making the move across to Office 365 it is now critical that we look at how best to enable an organisation to protect itself from such downtime windows and how operational continuity can be maintained.
Office 365 is built on a robust and diverse data centre and DR arrangement, but at the core of it the technology is open to failure, just like any other platform. Because of this companies like Mimecast, Sophos Central and Barracuda have introduced companion cloud applications which integrate with Office 365 to provide a level of protection that cannot be offered by a single vendor solution.
In terms of e-mail protection, the above-mentioned platforms use a system of continuity which allows mail to continue following in and out and staff to continue operating as normal while Office 365 is out of action. This would prevent any risk to the financial and operational stability of the organisation. We saw this come into its own during the downtime last week, while some of our Microsoft 365 customers who choose not to purchase these platforms where offline when Microsoft suffered the outage, the customers who had the platforms continued to work.
Can your organisation risk the impact of downtime that a failure on the Microsoft Office 365 platform would cause? If not give one of our Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery specialists a call today.
