Kevin Beaver's Security Blog

Email business continuity – this is funny…and ironic

As I reported a couple of days ago, my email security provider stopped working. Maybe they took a hiatus…a sabbatical…an extended vacation – and didn’t tell me. Seriously, I did end up calling them a few times trying to work things out. I got what seemed to be a knowledgeable tech rep trying to help me. The problem was he never could. He said he’d call me back two different times. He made several promises to get “development” involved so they could release my 2, no 3, days worth of emails stuck in their queue. Care to guess the outcome?

No emails recovered. No call back. I’m stuck on my own. The tech rep said they were sent. I never received them…That’s a tough one prove but the fact of the matter is that I lost over 100 emails. Odds are only 10-15 were legitimate emails that matter to my business, but that’s not the point. The very thing I’ve depended on for business continuity in the event my email server or Internet connection was down – their email queue – ended up creating a business continuity problem for me. I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. No such luck.

The vendor is St. Bernard. Their service is iPrism. I’ve had a “free” account with them since the Singlefin days back in 2003. Another case of you get what you pay for?

The funny thing is that Google is apparently having similar email delivery problems of their own. Postini had an outage and people went 20 hours without email….woooo, big deal! How about several days worth like I experienced? The ironic thing is that I’m considering moving to Postini. Who would’ve thought…

I’m telling you folks, you have to be careful hopping on this “cloud computing” bandwagon…as in St. Bernard’s case and apparently in Google’s case as well (with Postini and the recent Gmail outages), these “SaaS” providers don’t always have our best interests in mind. Free service or not, customer no-service is always an option so you’d better plan for it advance.