Widespread Office 365 Outage Underscores the Need for Email Continuity

Yesterday, Office 365 experienced a significant outage across most of the US and Europe as reported by sites like downdetector.com and MSPmentor.net leaving customers unable to log-in to Exchange Online to read, respond, send, or receive new emails.  Many of our customers that have already migrated to Office 365 believed these types of events were a thing of the past.  The belief was that moving to Office 365 would simplify operations in the hopes they could get out of the game of keeping Exchange servers up and running.  However, one of the biggest trade-offs made was greater control of availability and uptime in the event of server failure.  The best practice had always been to cluster  Exchange servers for HA and replicated their data offsite using DAGs.  Unfortunately, when they migrated to Office 365 they gave up the control of uptime and failover. 

While the latest Office 365 outage is unfortunate, Barracuda Essentials customers have nothing to worry about thanks to the Email Continuity Service built into our Barracuda Essentials products.  The Email Continuity Service allows IT admins, in the event of Exchange server failure, or in this case Office 365 outage, to fail-over to Barracuda’s cloud-based email servers to continue email operations until services are restored.  During this failover time, the Email Continuity Service allows end-users to send, receive, compose, and forward emails when email services are unavailable, keeping the company moving and employees productive so that orders can be processed, customer and vendor communication continues,  and any other operation that requires email continues seamlessly.

If you are a current Barracuda Essentials customer or working on a trial you can turn on Email Continuity by following these steps:

1. Log in to Barracuda Cloud Control @ login.barracuda.com


2. Go to Users > Email Continuity.


3. Set Email Continuity to Auto-Enable.
   
   
   
   • If you did not enable spooling, the Enable Spooling dialog box displays. Click OK.
   
   
   
   


4. Click Save Changes.

To learn more about Barracuda Essentials for Office 365 please visit https://www.barracuda.com/essentials

To learn more about the Essentials Email Continuity Service please visit https://campus.barracuda.com/product/essentials/article/Essentials/EmailContinuity/

Danny Milrad is the Director, Product Marketing, for Barracuda.  He specializes in email security, content security, ransomware, and more. Connect with him on LinkedIn here.