Zenprise, which offers solutions to proactively troubleshoot problems in BES and Exchange environments, contracted Osterman Research to conduct the study. Respondents include 76 IT decision makers in North American companies running BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES) for Microsoft Exchange with at least 500 employees.

BlackBerry Pearl

It pays for CIOs to reduce the amount of BES or Exchange downtime their organizations experience for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that corporate BlackBerry users tend to be high profile employees like C-level executives and other managers who perform crucial job functions, according to the survey. Ninety-five percent of organizations queried said senior managers at their organization are BlackBerry users and 63 percent said middle managers use the devices, according to Zenprise.

Additional survey findings include statistics on how long it takes IT organizations on average to recover from issues affecting the BlackBerry infrastructure, as well as the impact of BES/Exchange downtime on user productivity.

Typical IT departments experience an average of 29 minutes of downtime in their BlackBerry environments each month, the survey found. (It is worth noting, however, that downtime is often caused by issues that are unrelated to BES, such as other infrastructure problems.)

When asked how BlackBerry-related downtime affects users' productivity in corporate settings, more than half of respondents said outages lead to a one percent to 10 percent decrease in staff efficiency; 21 percent said worker productivity decreases by 26 percent to 50 percent; 17 percent said staff efficiency decreases by 11 percent to 25 percent; and four percent of respondents said employee productivity decreases by more than 50 percent. None of the organizations said worker productivity is unaffected by BES/Exchange environment downtime.

Ahmed Datoo, Zenprise's vice president of marketing, offers these tips on how to help prevent BES or Exchange downtime, as well as how to best recover from service outages.

Five Tips for a Healthy BES Environment:

1. Ensure You Have Enough Exchange Server Capacity
   
   Every BlackBerry user added to your environment can generate a significant load on your Exchange server. An Exchange server that is overburdened with users and doesn't have enough capacity will cause availability problems for BES.



2. Co-Locate Your BES and Exchange Servers
   
   There is a fair amount of network traffic between your BES and Exchange servers. Co-locating your servers in the same geographic location reduces risk of outages attributed to slow/unavailable network connections.



3. Consistently Monitor and Audit Your Active Directory Infrastructure
   
   Changes made to permissions within Active Directory can cause users to no longer be able to send/receive e-mails.



4. Apply Patches on Exchange Server Judiciously as Such Patches Can Break BES
   
   BES server requires the same version of files that can be found on the Exchange server. Patches applied to Exchange that update file versions will cause problems with BlackBerrys.



5. Monitor Your End-to-End BlackBerry Infrastructure
   
   Set up a monitoring system to detect carrier-related outages or outages with the Research In Motion (RIM) network. This allows you to quickly identify whether the problem is external or within your infrastructure.