While you may have the financial resources and IT staff needed to setup an in-house exchange server, that’s probably not the best decision for your business. Hosted exchange services offer convenience, increased reliability, cost savings, better security and increased productivity over in-house enterprise email systems.
Convenience and Reliability
When email goes down business grinds to a halt. Today, we use email as an alternative to phone conversations, faxes and letter delivery through the mail. Business negotiations, signed contracts, invoices and much more are delivered to and from your business via email. As important as email is to your business, you need to know that your exchange server will be online and operating properly at all times. You could try to achieve this with on-site IT services, provided you can get a solid Internet connection, redundant power systems and round-the-clock support. Even if you can afford to setup all these supporting systems, it’s not worth the hassle or risk that your email may go down. Hosted exchange options offer greater convenience with much higher reliability when compared with in-house enterprise email systems. This is because commercial data centers already have excellent and redundant systems in place to deliver fast Internet access and reliable power.
Cost
When these systems are collected in the same area it’s easy to reduce costs. Rather than buying your own hardware, setting up your own redundant systems and hiring round-the-clock IT support, these costs are shared. The data center purchases all these services and divides the cost between the companies using their services. This process drives down the cost of hosted exchange services while providing more reliable exchange services than an internal enterprise email system.
Security
When you host your own exchange server, you’re in charge of fending off hackers, protecting your email addresses, restricting access to your mailing lists, blocking spam and overseeing all the security needs of your in-hours exchange server. Given that managing an exchange server is likely not the focus of your business, it will require a lot of effort to stay on top of ever-changing security threats. Even if your business has the resources to properly setup an in-house exchange server, it’s not possible to deliver the same level of security as the dedicated IT staff at a hosted exchange provider. Their job is to follow the latest developments in exchange server security and keep your hosted exchange server protected and online.
Productivity
Sure, your company has an in-house IT department that could setup and manage an exchange server. They’re competent and capable of keeping up with the administrative and security-related tasks for the server. However, you’ve got to consider the best use of your IT department’s time. Should they be managing your exchange server or working on more strategic tasks. By offloading the mundane task of managing an exchange server, your in-house IT staff can focus on helping your team achieve business objectives through technology.
There’s no reason to burden your in-house IT staff with managing an exchange server when there are so many reasons to go with a hosted provider. First, it’s more convenient and reliable to have a business exchange service hosted at a data center. Second, the cost is much lower with hosted exchange services when compared to in-house enterprise email services. Third, hosted exchange services are far more secure than in-house configurations. Finally, by freeing your IT staff from the mundane task of managing your exchange server, they can focus on the technology needs of your company that are more in line with the goals of your business. For all these reasons, it’s a much better idea to use a hosted exchange service over in-house enterprise email services.