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Traditional approaches to high availability and disaster recovery provide incomplete protection at prices that are staggeringly high. When database corruption, directory problems, viruses, or configuration errors occur, expensive replication, clustering, and log-shipping solutions will fail and email will go down.

IBM Express Managed Services provides a better approach. IBM's Email Continuity service helps ensure that email will always work and messages will not be lost no matter what happens to your local systems, staff or infrastructure. Whenever you have a planned or unplanned outage, the Email Continuity service kicks in and enables users to continue to send and receive email through Outlook®, a web browser, or via BlackBerry® wireless devices.

Pragmatix is an authorized reseller of IBM Email Continuity. More than 1,000 Chief Information Officers and millions of end users depend on the technology behind the Email Continuity service to help ensure that email never bounces and that Exchange outages are not evident to the outside world. Although a fraction of the cost of other alternatives, the Email Continuity service is the only solution to help eliminate email downtime and data loss.

How the Email Continuity service works
As email is sent and received within Exchange, a copy of each email is compressed and encrypted for transmission to IBM's top-tier, disaster recovery datacenters. Email and attachments are securely stored in an encrypted format with all relevant metadata intact.

In the event of an outage — widespread or partial — the Email Continuity service can be activated in less than a minute. Outlook users are redirected seamlessly to the backup email service making email server and infrastructure outages virtually invisible. In addition, BlackBerry wireless devices continue to send and receive email and users have full access to email, contacts, and calendar entries. Your company maintains email continuity among its employees and all external contacts.

Help ensure that you don't lose data
Until the Email Continuity service, organizations have struggled to prevent data loss from database corruption. Unlike high-availability solutions based on replication, clustering, vaulting, and log shipping, the Email Continuity service is not vulnerable to database corruption. These alternative approaches too often simply replicate the problem in the primary email system to the backup solution, leading to complete data loss from the point of the failure.

If messages are ever lost or corrupted in the primary email system, the Email Continuity service makes it easy to locate missing messages and quickly restore them back to Exchange — with all forensic information intact (including time/date stamps, BCC recipients, and read/unread status). With the Email Continuity service there is no need to rebuild the entire server or environment, lost messages can quickly be restored by server, storage group, or mailbox.

The Email Continuity service protects your data with many layers of security to satisfy the most stringent regulated businesses and the largest enterprises. Security capabilities include: integration with Active Directory authentication, AES encryption of messages, SSL encryption for transport, stringent InfoSec policies, and hosting within IBM's top-tier disaster recovery datacenters. All wireless traffic is 3DES encrypted in compliance with RIM policies.

The Email Continuity service is designed to provide the best performance at the lowest cost
Traditional email high-availability solutions are difficult to deploy and grow, requiring provisioning and maintenance of servers, licenses, patches, additional storage capacity, additional user capacity, disaster recovery systems, and complex backups systems. For a fraction of the price of these alternative solutions, IBM's Email Continuity service provides a zero maintenance solution without the risks of email downtime and data loss.