BCCS Enterprise Email service option for Priority Disaster Recovery
The Bureau of Communication and Computer Services (BCCS) of the Illinois Department of Central Management Services now offers an optional service to native Enterprise Exchange customers, Priority Disaster Recovery. Native Enterprise Exchange customers are those who already have a mailbox on the Shared Services Enterprise Email system or are those customers for whom CMS hosts their email. This option is built within Microsoft Office Exchange 2007 and is designed to provide additional redundancy and recovery support for Microsoft Exchange/Outlook email, BlackBerry, and Enterprise vaulting services if a major disaster or other outage occurs.
The Priority Disaster Recovery option provides individual native Enterprise Exchange users with the assurance of high-priority recovery. With this new option BCCS is able to apply fail-over technology with secured off-site recovery capabilities to fully restore valuable email services within 4 to 12 hours after a major outage incident. This would minimize any potential interruptions in email services for those users and essentially ensure reliable and continued email service soon after the occurrence of any major disaster or other outage. A rate of $3.00/user/month/ mailbox is charged for this option in addition to your current mailbox charge.
For those standard Enterprise Email users the normal disaster recovery window is based on a “best effort” basis with no implied commitment on a specific timeframe pertaining to recovery. BCCS has and will always do its best to provide recovery and stabilization as soon as possible to reactivate usage of valuable Enterprise Email services. However, given the environment and adverse circumstances that may accompany a major disaster or other outage it is possible that Enterprise Email services could be interrupted for a substantial period of time.
In many instances Enterprise Email services, including BlackBerry services, are critical to the pursuit of agency missions and the provision of needed State services to the public. For those customers whose use of Enterprise Email services is considered critical to their agency operations during a major disaster or other outage, the Priority Disaster Recovery option offers paramount reliability and assurance that those critical Enterprise Email services will be quickly recovered.
For those customers who are interested in taking advantage of the new Enterprise Email service option for Priority Disaster Recovery please contact your IT Coordinator to submit the necessary Enterprise Service Request (ESR) for the service addition. For all Enterprise Email users that take advantage of this new option the $3.00/user/month/mailbox charge will be waived for the remainder of FY10. Users would start to incur the additional cost during the first billing cycle in FY11.