Email Down, Business Down

Email has become so critically important for most of us that outages of even a few minutes are intolerable in many cases. My email was down late last week for a few hours, resulting in bounces to those who were sending me email and the inability to receive email on my primary account. While I was able to send email from a backup account, most of my email capability was seriously impaired.

On Tuesday, March 27th, Google Gmail users were experiencing a similar problem: email was inaccessible for a large number of its users.

What's the price of email downtime and how do you calculate an ROI for technologies that can reduce or eliminate it? It's not an easy calculation, since downtime can cause anything from irritation to lost business and it's difficult to predict what will occur during an email downtime. For example, one individual who posted a message on the Google Apps discussion thread was fearful of "losing out on a potential contract" because of the GMail downtime. If this had happened the day before or the day after, perhaps the only real downside would have been inconvenience.

How does your organization evaluate technologies that can reduce downtime?