Over the past few days, a number of reports made headline news: At the beginning of the week, Microsoft announced problems with its Outlook service for private users. Many users were temporarily unable to access their email accounts via the web service or their email clients. Only a few days earlier, corporate customers in Germany had also been affected and within Microsoft 365, access to Exchange Online was severely impacted.
Why fail-safe operations are vital in email communication
These kind of news stories have been circulating ever more frequently in recent times. As these latest incidents both involved the market leader and occurred within a very short space of time, the repercussions have helped to clearly demonstrate that email remains the beating heart of daily business communication. Whether they contain requests for offers, project alignment details or internal communication, when emails can’t be delivered or received a large number of business processes come to a standstill.
New regulations create new requirements
On top of this, recent regulations prompted by the EU’s NIS2 directive require operators of critical infrastructure to implement provisions aimed at preventing the unavailability of IT services and boosting the resilience of their systems. It’s also important to consider that not all outages result from technical malfunctions on the part of cloud providers, as was the case in these recent incidents. Ransomware attacks, misconfiguration of systems or hardware defects are among the many incidents which may lead to severe consequences. In addition to a loss of turnover, companies are also at risk of suffering immense damage to their corporate image if commercial partners and customers have no way of getting in touch with them for several days.
Multi-layered protection through independent Email Continuity
To brace themselves for temporary outages or attacks, companies need additional protection. This is where Retarus Email Continuity comes in. In case of emergency, the solution seamlessly steps in, not only ensuring that email traffic can continue flowing but also enabling smooth access to recent email correspondence.
The service operates fully independently of the primary email provider and is exclusively run from Retarus’ certified data centers located within the EU. For the duration of the outage, the solution automatically takes over all inbound emails, buffers them and makes them available via a user-friendly webmail account. Even during wide-ranging outages involving multiple components in the company network, users continue to have easy access to their email communication. Importantly, this ensures that users remain reachable at their regular email addresses. Thanks to continual synchronization up front, all contacts and recent email threads are up to date and immediately available when disaster strikes.
Find out more about Retarus Email Continuity on our website, via our partners or directly from your Retarus representative.
