Communications in Rubble
(Royalty-free photo from pxfuel.com)
After changing hands, a small business that has been using a service for email antispam, antivirus and disaster continuity decided to switch to a more commonly used antispam and antivirus service.
The business is of a type where customers most urgently need to get through when disasters happen. You know the type: insurance, health care, property management… I mentioned that email disaster continuity has been needed a couple of times over the years, and they’re ending it. They shrugged. It’s their business now, not mine, so I shrugged too.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine.
When I talk about disaster continuity, I mention storms, floods, fires… commonplace catastrophes. It didn’t occur to me to mention artillery or missiles. Bombs? I thought those would be planted by terrorists, not dropped by an air force.
Among the many effects of climate change, more wars are expected. Wars over water, food, arable land, places with livable climates… Although this particular war is not about that, war should be in my list of potential disasters. It wasn’t.
Ukraine’s tech sector is strong. In recent years I had occasion to meet (in Zoom) with a firm there about a proposal for a project. They made the other bidders look like amateurs.
Now a great many of Ukraine’s techies are uprooted. Many IT people can work from anyplace where they can go online. But like the business in the States, they need to be able to communicate with colleagues, vendors and clients. Phone calls aren’t enough, and if a call can’t go through at the moment, the best you can do is leave voicemail. They need to be able to send and receive electronic files and messages that can be picked up whenever the addressee can get online, however briefly. In a war, who can rely on having uninterrupted clear signal long enough to listen to long queues of voicemail, and on a regular basis?
The most important element of business continuity for them, not to mention connection with their families and friends, is email. Social media is fine for quick notes, but not for hefty substantial messages.
The entire building that held their email server may be a pile of rubble.
In a nation under attack, they shouldn’t need to be searching for an intact data center and setting up a fresh email service. They shouldn’t need to be trying to reach all their contacts to give them an alternative email address at some free provider that may not allow enough storage to handle the high volume of messages flying around in a crisis. They need to still be able to use their usual email addresses even though their email system is gone.
That’s what the business that changed hands had, bundled in with their antispam and antivirus protection. Big companies can set it up for themselves with mirrored computer servers in data centers many miles apart, or standby email servers in a distant data center that are kept nearly up to date and ready to be fired up quickly in an emergency. That’s too much for a small business to do.
Small businesses generally get it the way the company that changed hands got it, buying it as a service. What did they need? No extra hardware. No extra software. It was easy to set up (a matter of configuration), only needed tuning once or twice in a decade, and cost about the same as a genuinely good antispam and antivirus system without disaster continuity. Email outage? Just use a special webmail address in a browser for access to fresh incoming and outgoing email, as well as the past couple of weeks of incoming messages. Nobody else would even know the usual server is gone.
It didn’t occur to me to talk about this with the Ukrainian team well ahead of the war. Now I wish I had.
Postscript: In conversation ahead of publishing this post, I was asked how to get the bundled antispam, antivirus and email disaster continuity and how much it costs.
To get it, you need to have control of your domain. You can’t use it with something like Gmail or Yahoo. You need to be able to change a few details in the configuration of your domain such as the MX records for your domain and DCIM. It’s quick and easy.
If you want to give it a try, let me know. I use it for my own businesses. It has saved my bacon a few times and the filtering is more accurate than any other system I’ve found. Although I don’t do marketing campaigns for it, I can provide it.
You can get it from someone else if you want. I can deliver it without the usual extra charge for disaster continuity and without the usual minimum order. You can have it even if your domain only has one email address. There’s no maximum and no long term commitment. You can cancel at any time with 30 days notice. The price is $1.20 per email address per month, or $1.10 for a registered non-profit. Big companies can (and do) use it too and can get a bulk price.