Why Your Company Needs Hosted Email
Email and other messaging capabilities are so critical to the communication, collaboration and file transport capabilities of most organizations, they have in some respects become a utility like electricity. For example, the typical information worker spends 165 minutes per day doing work in their email client/interface, making it the most important single tool that the typical user employs.
Moreover, email is so critical to the operation of any organization that it no longer provides any substantive competitive differentiation between companies. Like other utilities, then, the goal shifts to:
a) Ensure that service remains available as close to 100% of the time as possible while
b) Simultaneously being provided as inexpensively as possible.
For most companies, managing email internally is a thing of the past, just like producing one’s own electricity is a concept of the past.
THE GROWTH OF HOSTED EMAIL
A growing number of organizations are finding that the way to accomplish lower costs and better management of email is through the use of hosted services, a model in which a remote third party provider manages all back-end services for a flat monthly per user fee. The advantages of this approach for organizations that want to realize the benefits of Exchange are that up-time of the Exchange infrastructure can be very high and the cost of managing internal resources can be reduced significantly – typically more than 50% compared to on-premises management, as shown in the following table. Further, the use of a hosted service allows an in-house IT staff to be deployed to other projects that will provide more value to the organization as a whole, enabling organizations to realize more value from the IT staff members.