Even as organizations become more dependent on e-mail to run their businesses, many don’t dedicate enough staff or technology to prevent downtime, according to a King Research survey [...]

A total of 220 respondents completed the survey.[...] Of those respondents, 96% reported that during an e-mail outage, there is a huge drop in productivity, and some employees cannot work at all.

A proactive approach with preventive maintenance of the e-mail system can prevent many unexpected outages. IT staffs, however, are finding it increasingly difficult to schedule downtime for server and application updates and maintenance. At the same time, 71% of participants report they spend two hours or less per month on maintenance.

As e-mail becomes more important for doing business and as the number and frequency of e-mails grow, it’s interesting to note that staffing to manage messaging applications is flat. For example, 77% of the survey respondents report that their staffs have not increased in the past 12 months. And 5% report that their staffs have actually decreased in size.