Independent research conducted by Dynamic Markets on behalf of Veritas Software has revealed that 58% of South African IT managers are fearful that their jobs would not be secure in the event of their e-mail system experiencing unplanned downtime.
User dependency on e-mail means that as little as one minute without access causes 26% of South African users within medium to large enterprises to become irate. After one hour, 84% throw their toys - one of the highest rates among all countries surveyed, the study declares.
Only 42% of the IT managers surveyed are confident that their jobs would not be on the line following any period of e-mail downtime.
The survey, carried out across the US as well as Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA), shows that in SA, actual use of e-mail for contractual reasons exceeds the permitted levels set by the individual companies surveyed.
While only 38% are permitted to use e-mail for contracts with suppliers, in reality 44% are actually using it in this way. Other examples of e-mail use that exceeds permission levels include contractual agreements with customers (36% permitted, 44% actual), reprimanding employees (14% permitted, 26% actual), pay rise allocations (38% permitted, 46% actual) and announcements of layoffs (36% permitted, 40% actual).
"Despite e-mail being used for contractual agreements with suppliers and customers in more than half the companies surveyed, with 8% already having had e-mail used in their defence or against them in a legal situation, the research reveals that only 24% can retrieve e-mails further than a year," says Dave Reddy, country manager of Veritas Software SA, a storage management company.
"In fact, 22% are only able to recover back as far as one month, 8% can only recover from the previous week and a further 2% only as far back as the previous day. This leaves companies exposed to potential legal risks."
Can`t find it, sorry
About 4% of SA IT managers surveyed said that if a manager asked them to locate a particular e-mail it would be impossible to recover it on the system, and a further 36% perceive "some level of difficulty" in locating e-mails.
Despite user tolerance levels being so low, 52% of SA IT managers surveyed did not know how long it would take to restore their e-mail system in the event of an unplanned incident. For 46% of IT managers, this would take one hour or more.
Among SA users to become irate, the quickest are top management (42%), IT staff (31%) and middle management (27%).
Stress seems to take its toll on South African IT managers, with 30% believing that a week without e-mail would be more stressful for them than one of a number of events including a minor car accident (6%), moving house (12%) and an announcement of potential layoffs (6%).
The cross-industry sample covered 850 IT managers tasked with the responsibility of maintaining the back-office e-mail environment. The research was conducted in the following countries (sample size): US (100), UK (100), France (100), Germany (100), Benelux (50), Spain (50), Sweden (50), Switzerland (50), SA (50), Austria (50), Poland (50), Middle East (50) and Italy (50).
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