Small problems can turn into large ones in Exchange environments that aren’t regularly monitored, causing the system to deteriorate quickly to the point of outage or even total failure.

There are a few areas to watch to prevent outages in single-sever Exchange environments and large enterprises with multiple servers. Here are three of the most common causes of extended Exchange outages.

Failed/Incomplete Disaster Recovery Plan

A failed recovery is the most common cause of extended Exchange outages. It may sound like circular logic, but if the Exchange environment is down for multiple days, the root cause of the failure is no longer relevant. Don’t let indecision and untested processes fuel a crisis. Every Exchange shop needs to have a detailed plan to recover each of the following: single mailbox, single database, single server and the entire environment.

While there are a number of third-party products that handle disaster recovery, tools and processes included with Microsoft Exchange and Windows Server are good options because Microsoft offers support and documentation for different disaster scenarios. Microsoft provides guidance on how to restore the following — a single mailbox from a database backup, an Exchange Server, a DAG Member Server and dial tone portability, which can solve failures of a mailbox database, server or entire site.

Use these procedures regularly to understand the process and test backups. The processes to restore a database and a single mailbox are not invasive; administrators can perform these procedures on live servers. It’s best to perform these on weekends and after hours to minimize the potential effect on end users.

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