Let's face it. Migrations of any kind take planning. Some estimates place the initial project planning time of email migrations at 80% of the entire project, with another 10% left to end-user training and the remaining 10% to the actual cutover. That's not how many migrations are happening in the industry today and that could be why many companies go through slow painful migrations.

The goals of a seamless transition to a new email system are:

1. Minimize user impact or downtime as possible
2. Retain all of the original data
3. Performed as quick and safely as possible

Other aspects do play a key role such as cost, however most IT leaders that have done internal cost analysis find that any expense incurred during the planning and migration is dwarfed by expenses incurred from poor planning and having email down for even a day.

The first step in a migration is having a good assessment of your messaging infrastructure. Next, planning with key business leaders to understand what the business requirements dictate in a new email infrastructure. Finally, creating an exhaustive step-by-step project plan outlining the schedule, milestones, roles & responsibilities, pilot phases, end user training, and eventual rollout. Many of these steps can be performed by the client's own IT staff after a valid project plan has been established. It is our goal at Gray Matter Computing to provide your company with the necessary tools to maintain and manage your email system after project completion. To this end our engineers will work closely with your team to establish a division of tasks, to provide knowledge transfer during and after the project, and to achieve customer satisfaction.

Email has become the tool of choice for business communications in the twenty-first century. Now, in many businesses, email has surpassed even the telephone for importance to maintaining uptime. Due in part to the accessibility of email, there are many more demands placed on the system delivering and handling your email. Also, email is becoming increasingly complex as it employs multiple databases, security solutions, and integrates with user domain architectures. New risks such as viruses or system failures place even more corporate information at risk. Now, more than ever, the email platform chosen must be robust, reliable, and secure.

There are different levels of availability that need to be considered within the context of your business needs. Certainly maintaining a separate Hot Spare email system with adjoining backups will offer quick recovery from disaster and also allow for daily testing of backups. The time to be up and running usually runs between 10 minutes to 1 hour. However, for companies that need less downtime, server arrays running Marathon Assured Availability technology offer 99.999% uptime. In fact, high availability solutions running Microsoft Exchange on the Windows operating system have been offering realistic High Availability for years now.

No matter the business requirements and the solution you choose, Gray Matter Computing has the expertise to plan, implement, and support your High Available Email System. In addition, our engineers will provide your staff the documentation in easy to follow procedures so that you have the power to manage your email and recovery from disasters without having to rely on outside consultants in the future.

The first step in maintaining an efficient and high level of uptime with your messaging system is to set documentation standards and maintain them periodically. For instance, in case of disaster, do you have a complete listing of all email settings and configurations or do these merely reside in your system administrator's head. This is absolutely critical during a disaster recovery effort. Having a complete picture of your email and its supporting systems (such as backups, anti-virus, SMTP relay, web email access, etc...) will make the difference between a swift recovery with little data loss or long recovery with total data loss.

Gray Matter Computing has been providing email infrastructure assessments for years in order to give companies a clear picture of their messaging system. Here are some examples of the usefulness of email assessments:

1. Gather much needed documentation especially if there is no particular system admin on staff tasked with supporting email.
2. Justify investments in new solutions. For instance, anti-virus software after an outbreak or to protect from one, or a new backup module to capture the email during online backups.
3. Qualify for certain regulatory standards such as the new requirements set by HIPAA for the health industry
4. Provide assurance to hosted customers as to the level of security.

Whatever the need, a Gray Matter Computing email assessments give you a snapshot of your current infrastructure including strengths, weaknesses, and most important of all, recommendations to improve your email system. Since all technology environments are constantly changing, Gray Matter Computing also offers additional regular follow-up checkups to identify new vulnerabilities and performance issues.