Imagine this scenario: It’s Monday morning and you check your email at 8:00am. Nothing new shows up in your inbox and you continue your morning assuming it was a slow weekend, or perhaps someone forgot to finalize a reporting process that you usually receive. 9:00am comes and goes, but you still haven’t received any new email. This is a bit odd, but perhaps your teams are catching up first-thing. By 10:00am, you’re starting to get suspicious at the quiet, so you try sending a colleague a test email. Over chat you check in to see if they received it – they did not. This is usually where you contact IT and they start the troubleshooting process. Shortly thereafter there’s finally confirmation: it’s a problem with your email provider.

This is what happens at most small-to-medium sized businesses with fewer resources for constant monitoring. Historically, this monitoring has been more costly or has relied entirely on waiting for a service provider such as Microsoft or Google putting out a service advisory. While this can work, even larger email providers can take a while to confirm a service incident is happening during which time you and your IT teams will be unaware or spend unnecessary time troubleshooting without the ability to solve the issue internally.

Sagin implements tools as a part of our managed services to help monitor and manage mail flow and help you keep your company in the know. The tools provide for continual mail flow monitoring with customized alerting that allow us to send alerts via text message as well as to external email systems that may be unaffected at the time an outage occurs. In addition, admins are sent a weekly summary report of mail flow that help identify trends.

Here’s a real-world example of the tools in action. On April 8, 2020, G Suite had an incident where mail was sporadically delayed in reaching the intended recipient. Our tools detected and informed our help desk and an on-site contact of the anomaly in mail flow a full two hours before Google announced that there was an issue. This alert gave us and our client the ability to quickly confirm the issue did not lie within the client’s network and make adequate adjustments in workflow to cover the time of the service interruption.

Knowing your email service provider is having issues as soon as possible is key to business continuity. Your staff will know to use alternate methods of collaboration, such as Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or phone calls. Meanwhile your tech team will no longer have to spend as much time figuring out the cause of the email outage. You can continue operating safe in the knowledge that your teams have done their due diligence to keep everyone in the know.

If you have experienced similar problems, contact SAGIN for a free diagnostic to see if these solutions are right for you.

SAGIN, LLC is a professional services firm which provides services in consulting, technology and talent management. If you would like to learn more about these solutions you can contact us at: +1.312.281.0290 or info@saginllc.com. Also visit us at www.saginllc.com