Internet Solutions (IS) and Symantec today announced the depth of their partnership and the value they offer to clients, by augmenting Symantec's market leading hosted email archiving solution* with free bundled Symantec Email Continuity. 

Effective 16th November 2011, all current and new clients within Africa that utilise the Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud email archiving service from IS, and their combined reseller channel, will now receive the previously paid for Symantec Email Continuity service, completely free of charge. The IS and Symantec email continuity solution offers a full cloud-based email service, (in the event of core infrastructure failure), allowing users to send and receive email and read and review their personal archives via Outlook, a mobile client or the Web, provided they have an Internet connection.

“Despite the myriad of communication services now incorporated into the corporate work environment, email still remains our primary communication tool for doing business,” explains Hayden Lamberti, Innovation and Technology Manager at IS. “This means that email downtime remains an unacceptable proposition due to its mission-critical nature, yet research suggests that most small - to medium-sized businesses experience more than 40 total hours of unplanned email downtime each year, while some estimates suggest that upwards of 40 percent of these outages last more than 24 hours.”

Lamberti explains that any loss in email service can result in reduced workforce productivity due to a slowdown in company operations and the loss of this vital communications channel. “This can severely impact on the organisation's performance, affecting customer service and supply chain efficiency, which all impacts negatively on the bottom line.”

Accordingly, organisations need a reliable solution that guarantees simple recovery, regardless of root cause, that gives them the ability to send and receive emails when their email servers are down. "The bundling of the hosted Symantec email archiving service with email continuity by IS enables us to offer email failure insurance to clients using a wide variety of email infrastructures, including Microsoft Exchange, Groupwise, Lotus Notes and Linux, as well as their cloud-based derivatives, like Hosted Exchange, Office 365 and Hosting Zimbra services, from any provider,” explains Lamberti. 

Mark Smissen, the Symantec Cloud Commercial Manager for MEA says, "there are three reasons why businesses buy email archiving solutions, the most common of which is to meet compliance requirements, followed by a need for email storage management and to have email disaster recovery capabilities. The problem with meeting these requirements with an in-house solution is that it requires additional physical storage, which comes with additional costs and operational and human resource requirements. By taking email archiving into the cloud we have been able to leverage off of the economies of scale that a leading hosting service provider, like IS offers. To simplify the storage management conundrum and bundle them with additional value added services.”

Smissen explains that IS and Symantec have been able to innovate in the way that the email continuity solution is provisioned from IS' data centre infrastructure, which has mitigated any increase in the cost of providing the solution. “We have therefore passed this benefit on to our customers, to give them access to an important element within any email archiving solution, at no extra cost. Most users are willing to pay for a service of this nature, as it offers them peace of mind, but we feel that if our customers are planning to archive their email in the cloud, then we should offer them a comprehensive bundled solution that delivers on the cloud computing value proposition,” concludes Smissen.

"I am extremely pleased that we have been able to put this together with our partners, Symantec, as we have managed to once again deliver added value to our clients, without the need to increase their costs,” continues Lamberti. Currently, email continuity is billed for by all the email security and compliance technology service providers as an additional cloud-based service, often attracting charges of up to R38 per user per month. “The ability for us to offer this previously paid for service, free of charge to clients is an operational and commercial bundling innovation that will set the bar for how email continuity which, by its nature is a cloud-based service, is sold in the future,” he concludes.