By Gordon Thompson, Remote Engineer
This article discusses the advantages of using an offsite service to host your company’s email. Within the SaaS (Software as a Service) community, email hosting is one of the most popular choices. This is largely due to the fact of how simple it is to implement and this simplicity is very attractive to small and medium sized business.nbsp
The number one reason businesses decide to outsource their email services to a hosting company is because of the capital costs associated with an in-house solution. When a CTO/CIO begins to add up the cost of buying a server with a maintenance contract, finding rack-space, installing the operating system, purchasing user licenses, realizing power consumption and finally employing an administrator, it’s easy to justify choosing a hosting company. The reason being, the hosting company pays for all of the hardware, they pay the operating system costs, they have available rack-space, they also have onsite engineers monitoring the physical health of the hardware and who can administer customer accounts. By choosing a hosting company, small and medium businesses can achieve a reasonable ROI and not have to concern themselves with upgrades and other maintenance costs.
The second reason for choosing a hosting service is due to the direction IT technology is headed. IT departments can no longer survive as a ‘one-man show’; the field is far too specialized to allow for that. IT departments now need an engineer who specializes in LAN (Local Area Network), another engineer who specializes in productivity software, possibly one for telephony and even a WAN (Wide Area Network) specialist. By using an email hosting company, a business can reduce its costs by eliminating the need for an Exchange or Lotus Notes specialist.
The simple fact that a hosting company is not geographically close to its customers leads to the third reason. A hosted email solution is a cheap disaster recovery solution. If your network goes down for whatever reason: loss of power, failing equipment, no internet connection; your emails are backed up at a site which is geographically separate from your headquarters. So when the power and/or internet are restored you can rest assured that your hosting company backed up all of your emails and the data contained within them. What happens if a hosting company loses power or their internet connection? If they are reputable they will have redundant systems. This means two separate and independent internet connections as well as emergency generators to provide electricity when it goes out. When interviewing potential hosting companies, this is one of the first questions that should be asked.Email hosting can be a cost-effective solution, call CIO today to receive more information on this option, 805-692-6700 .