Indiana outage raises email risk management concerns

(Thursday, February 25, 2010) | Category : Email archiving

Email risk management topped the concerns of many internet users in western Kentucky and southern Indiana after a hardware failure at internet service provider Evansville Online cut off access to email and other online services, according to a recent article.

Representatives from Evansville Online parent company Norlight said the outage occurred after two hard drives critical to running local internet services failed simultaneously, the Evansville Courier and Press reported. The outage affected 4,000 dialup customers, as well as users of other internet services.

"This highly unlikely event corrupted 600GB of data, a significant portion of which was instrumental in some services we provide to our newspaper and media partners including email and online publishing," Norlight executive Pat Heck reported told the newspaper.

Dialup customers lost access to email, among other online services during the outage, the article noted. The faulty hardware that caused the outage needed to be replaced before service could be restored.

Many customers affected by the outage may have preserved email messages that otherwise would have been lost during the outage if they had an email risk management system in place. Email archiving and other tools have become critical to ensuring business continuity at many newspapers, online publishers and other companies that rely on online communications.