New research from Mimecast finds that organizations face growing pressure to keep BlackBerry services up and running

Mimecast®, a leading supplier of cloud-based email security, continuity and archiving, has today announced the results from a new report on BlackBerry continuity, highlighting the increasing importance of keeping business BlackBerry users fully connected at all times. The report, entitled Keeping the Enterprise Agile and Mobile (link below), examines the growing pressure on IT teams to keep BlackBerry services up and running at all times and finds that IT departments are struggling to respond to user demands.

Based on research conducted by Incisive Media, the report finds that expectations of BlackBerry users are extremely high, with two thirds (66 percent) saying that as little as one hour of downtime per month is unacceptable and 22 percent demanding no break in service at all. These high expectations reflect the growing importance of BlackBerry services, with many users seeing the ability to access email from any location as essential to their business. A third (33 percent) of users admitted that the inability to access mobile services had either damaged their organization’s reputation or had caused them to lose business.

BlackBerry downtime is also one of the biggest headaches for the IT team; 58 percent of respondents say that an interruption in service causes complaints from board level and 39 percent say that it causes their helpdesk to be inundated with calls. However, 35 percent of IT teams admit that their organization has experienced a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) outage in the past 12 months, with 34 percent suffering a Microsoft Exchange Server outage.

Despite this, many IT teams are still not taking steps to reduce the impact of BlackBerry service downtime on their organizations. 41 percent of organizations have no provisions in place to ensure high availability of the service. Furthermore, 59 percent of those IT departments questioned admitted that they did not have an effective BlackBerry continuity solution in place and 61 percent had no internal Service Level Agreement (SLA) for BlackBerry email availability.

Barry Gill, Product Marketing Manager at Mimecast, commented; “BlackBerry smartphones bring huge benefits in terms of increased productivity and agility, but they are also presenting IT teams with new challenges, not least of which is making sure that ‘always on’ services really are always on. Companies should weigh up the benefits of native BlackBerry Enterprise Server high availability with its associated costs against those offered in the SLA of a third-party provider, which should guarantee email delivery to smartphones during a BES or Exchange outage.”

Mimecast provides a 100 percent SLA-backed continuity service for BlackBerry users, keeping emailing flowing even when the BlackBerry Enterprise Server or associated network infrastructure fails. Mimecast BlackBerry Continuity, launched in April 2010, removes the need for standby servers, maximising organisations’ investment in the BlackBerry wireless solution and supporting user productivity with an uninterrupted email service.

To download a copy of the full report, please click on the link below (registration required)

http://www.mimecast.com/Keeping-the-enterprise-agile-and-mobile

About Mimecast

Mimecast (www.mimecast.com) delivers SaaS-based enterprise email management including security, continuity and archiving. By unifying disparate and fragmented email environments into one holistic solution that is always available from the cloud, Mimecast minimizes risk and reduces cost and complexity, while providing total end-to-end control of email. Founded in the United Kingdom in 2003, Mimecast serves approximately 3,500 customers worldwide and has offices in Europe, North America, Africa and the Channel Islands.