Business-critical communication: The five biggest challenges businesses are facing

Munich, December 15, 2022 //

Communicating by way of email and other channels plays an essential role in daily business, yet most companies remain unaware of the ramifications a failure in the communications infrastructure may have on the company’s image, not to mention the economic impact they stand to suffer. Therefore, it is pivotal to secure business-critical communication processes comprehensively. In this context, enterprise cloud service provider Retarus outlines what companies need to consider when safeguarding their communications infrastructure.

1. Maintain business continuity when email fails

When key components in the IT infrastructure fail, a business can quickly incur damages and losses amounting to millions of euros. That’s why every business needs to have a failover solution, which seamlessly allows communication to continue in emergency situations. A cloud-based email continuity solution with provisioned email accounts – one which works totally independently of the main email system – ensures that email communication can remain uninterrupted in such cases. This allows employees to continue sending and receiving emails, even when disaster strikes.

2. Ward off cyberattacks from specific countries

Especially in the current political situation, it can be helpful to isolate all messages originating from certain regions or countries preventively, regardless of their content. Be it for purely security-related reasons or to meet specific compliance requirements. A service such as Retarus Predelivery Logic enables IT decision-makers to analyze all email traffic based on their own predefined rulesets and block emails. If necessary, this can all happen before the emails have reached the company‘s infrastructure. For instance, emails can be targeted for specially defined processing based on their country of origin (GeoIP). Depending on the configuration, this means that certain messages can be isolated in the user quarantine. In addition to the geographic origin, it is also possible to further process emails automatically based on their language.

3. Unburden the IT department

Due in no small part to the prevailing shortage of expert staff, IT departments are severely overstretched. Meanwhile, outdated infrastructure and technology are adding to the problem. A lack of digitalization and automation are causing expert IT staff to lose valuable time troubleshooting and searching for errors. The result is that there are hardly any resources available for value-adding activities. The same is equally true for the reliable exchange of business-relevant messages. A modern, flexible, and scalable cloud messaging platform can provide substantial relief to IT departments from the burden of routine tasks, helping employees achieve more agility. This consequently allows staff to focus more of their efforts towards introducing innovative solutions to the business objectives of the company.

4. Integrate suppliers successfully

Numerous suppliers across various categories are involved in different processes along the supply chain. Companies therefore must confront large amounts of inbound and outbound documents, including orders, confirmations, delivery notifications, and invoices. These are processed differently in each organization, often requiring substantial manual efforts to sort records, convert them into specific formats, and make them available via an ERP system. Considering the tremendous time and high costs this process demands, it is advisable to integrate all suppliers in a single cloud platform, regardless of their size or type. In the ideal case, this would convert unstructured data into structured information, before automatically feeding it into the ERP system in the required format. The automated processing of business documents enables companies to benefit from a more frictionless cash flow and cost savings of around 60 percent when compared with manual processes.

5. Send transactional emails reliably

Sending information quickly and reliably to a large number of recipients at the same time poses a challenge for many companies. In particular, sending huge volumes of marketing emails, newsletters, or password changes is especially complex and can easily push a company’s own email infrastructure to its absolute limits. Even more concerning is that messages only reach a recipient’s inbox if the sender is rated trustworthy. State-of-the-art email APIs make it possible to send volumes of 10 million emails an hour, straight from the company’s business applications – without burdening their own corporate email infrastructure. At the same time, comprehensive reputation management and continual data traffic monitoring and optimization ensures that messages are reliably placed in the inboxes of all potential recipients. Certification by the Certified Sender Alliance (CSA) further ensures the whitelisting of the IP addresses used to transmit the messages. In this way, companies benefit from top delivery rates.