Company offers e-mail protection to companies during disasters

If this year's Hurricane Season brings storms toward Southwest Florida, businesses can protect incoming e-mail messages for free if their servers crash through the Florida Chamber of Commerce and AppRiver, LLC.

"Any Florida company can sign up for the Digital Disaster Preparedness program when their area is under a Hurricane Watch," said Heather Radi, public relations account executive for The Pen Group.

During a hurricane, if a company's IT infrastructure is vulnerable, or damaged, the service will protect and preserve e-mail for businesses who have signed up. Once a business is back up and running, the e-mail is routed back to the company.

"If a hurricane threatens server damage or power outages without back-up, this is the perfect system for ensuring the continued flow of e-mail," said Blake Gehres, chief technology officer for the Florida Chamber of Commerce. "Businesses can avoid disruption to their e-mail traffic for the duration of any outages at no cost by taking advantage of this service.

The Digital Disaster Preparedness service is available to companies with an Internet domain name. Businesses simply request the service on-line, which takes less than 10 minutes, according to a press release issued May 15. This is the first year AppRiver is working with the Florida Chamber of Commerce to make the service available to all Florida businesses during Hurricane season, according to Scott Cutler, AppRiver Vice President. Last year, the service was available on a more limited basis.

Orv Curry, network manager for Oswald Trippe & Co., began using the service for Hurricane Wilma. Oswald Trippe & Co. is an independent insurance outfit with 11 offices in Lee and Collier counties.

During Hurricane Charley, Curry said, the company did not have the service and it had two days where its business was down, and all of its e-mail was lost. The company was signed up for the disaster preparedness e-mail saver during Hurricane Wilma and all of the company e-mails were held until power was back up. It also sent an automatic reply to incoming e-mail senders that the company's system was done. Curry liked that feature, because along with the automatic reply, it asked senders to call their office or fax them. Once the insurance company was back on-line, App River released its e-mails.

"That was a big benefit," Curry said. "We have been very happy with the service."

Curry's company even signed up for additional services through AppRiver, because it saw an advantage to AppRiver's technology, which reduced the amount of spam and viruses to its e-mail system.

AppRiver monitors companies' e-mail server activity once they are signed up for the program. If, for any reason, a business's server goes down AppRiver will queue incoming e-mails in one of its data centers in Texas, Virginia and England until the server is fully functioning. The company can also request its e-mail be directed somewhere else.

"In the digital age, lost e-mail can mean lost customers, lost revenue and lost opportunities," Michael Murdoch, CEO of AppRiver, said. "We have seen the effects of lost e-mail on business in our community and around the world and want to offer protection to other companies in Florida that may be especially vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding and other natural disasters."

The service is free from June 1 to Nov. 30, and it also includes free spam and virus filtering. According to Cutler, AppRiver is able to offer the free service because it processes e-mail for more than 6,000 organizations around the world, adding about 100 clients each week. AppRiver's growth rate requires them to maintain a large amount of excess capacity, which also contributes to their ability to offer the service at no cost.

"Also, the program is only engaged while organizations recover from the storm. All communication channels are crucial during any kind of severe weather event — offering this to our fellow businesses within Florida has a very small cost and seems like the right thing to do," Cutler said.