Independent research commissioned by Veritas Software revealed that 58 percent of Middle East IT managers are fearful that their jobs would not be secure in the event of their companies’ email system experiencing unplanned downtime.
User dependency on email means that as little as one minute without email access causes 18 percent of Middle East users within medium to large enterprises to become irate, and after just one hour, this outcome rises to a staggering 78 percent of users. Only 42 percent of regional IT managers surveyed are confident that their jobs would not be on the line following any period of email downtime.
With email becoming so business critical to Middle East-based organizations, user tolerance levels are low. If unplanned downtime occurs, 12 percent of Middle East users become irrate immediately, 16 percent within one minute, and 48 percent within just half an hour. Irate staff are spread throughout all job functions, but are particularly high amongst top management and IT staff. Despite this finding, 54 percent of IT managers surveyed did not know how long it would take to restore their email system in the event of an unplanned incident.
The survey, carried out across US, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), also shows that in the Middle East, 26 percent of companies are permitted to use email for contracts with suppliers and 24 percent for contracts with customers. Sixty-six percent of companies reported that if a manager asked them to locate a particular email, it would not be difficult to recover it on the system, yet 46 percent of companies surveyed cannot recover emails past one year; including six percent that cannot recover as far back as a single day.
Despite being able to use email for contractually binding matters four percent can only recover from the previous day, 12 percent can go back one week, four percent back one month, and six percent can recover back to six months.
The findings of this research on electronic communications will be presented to the delegates at the upcoming Veritas Vision event taking place at the Emirates Towers Hotel in Dubai on June 11. The research was conducted by Dynamic Markets. The respondents were from medium to large-scale organizations employing 500 or more staff. The cross industry sample covered 850 IT Managers with the responsibility of maintaining the back-office email environment. — (menareport.com)
© 2003 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
