"We don't want huge attachments blocking customer traffic from our Web site or employee VPN traffic from our remote locations," says Martin. "This gives us guaranteed quality of service and helps to juggle all the priorities."

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Plan B: Backing up the e-mail system

The server crashes, the power goes out, or some other minor or major disaster occurs, and your organization's e-mail system is down. That's when you need a Plan B. In those cases, two critical concerns are getting the e-mail system running again and saving as much data as possible. A regular (and tested) backup of the e-mail server and an off-site standby server or mail service is considered essential these days.

For instance, supply chain services provider Con-way has a multiserver standby in an off-site location for all of its Windows applications, including Exchange. Daily and weekly tape backups are sent to the off-site location.