Businesses of all sizes must do more to ensure all their business continuity practices are fully up to scratch after a new study revealed that the majority of email outages are only noticed by company IT departments when customers phone up to complain.

The survey of more than 100 companies in the UK and US was carried out by Osterman Research, and found that 56 per cent of those firms surveyed only realised that their email system was down when users notified them of problems sending or receiving emails.

The research also established that those companies questioned experienced more than an hour of email outage each month, potentially costly lapses which led the research team to call for firms to consider better business continuity planning or risk their future business prosperity.

"Organisations are placing their future success at risk," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "The need for a continuous availability solution is clear, yet most organisations do not yet have such a solution in place."

Those firms whose staff used Blackberrys to keep in touch with office goings-on were found to be subject to an even higher number of email outage issues, with an organisation's BlackBerry Enterprise Server thought to contribute to lapses in communication.

Research for Connect in 2007 found that 88 per cent of UK businesses were interested in Disaster Recovery systems primarily to protect their critical applications and data