Over 75 percent of a company’s intellectual property lies in the ideas, documents and projects sent via email. Traditionally, businesses have purchased and maintained dedicated email servers in-house to handle the amount of email traffic. However, maintaining a dedicated email server requires significant amounts of time and money to perform maintenance, upgrades and troubleshooting. With the prevalence of cloud servers, many businesses are ditching the traditional dedicated server for hosted exchange.
A hosted exchange server offers space at an external data center where emails, attachments and other data are stored. Employees access the data through the Web or a desktop application. The host provides all server maintenance, leaving your IT staff with significant amounts of time to tend to other needs.
Benefits of a Hosted Exchange Server
- Reduced Cost:
- Hosted exchange pricing can be cheaper than the cost of purchasing and maintaining an in-house server. Pay for only the capacity you need, and scale up as your organization grows. As another benefit, the annual costs of choosing a hosted solution are predictable, which makes budgeting easier. If data center equipment fails, it’s the host’s financial responsibility to fix it, not yours.
- Access anywhere, at any time:
Since your host stores emails in its data center, employees can login from anywhere or at any time. This helps increase staff productivity.
- Free up Office Space:
In-house servers require a significant amount of space. Switching to a hosted server frees up that physical space so you can put it to better use.
- Host Monitors and Fixes Problems:
Your staff no longer has to troubleshoot problems with email accounts, apply patches or perform system maintenance. The host assumes these responsibilities.
- Enhanced Functionality:
Hosted email servers offer add-ons that enhance productivity, such as calendaring, reminders and notes.
- Ease of Deployment:
Getting an in-house server up and running takes time, skill and a certain amount of troubleshooting. You need tech experts to accomplish this. With a hosted server, you can be up and running within minutes and you don’t need to perform any of the hard work to enable deployment.
- Round-the-clock Customer Support:
If you’re working late and the email server crashes, no one is on hand to help. If you’re lucky, you can call an IT staff member and he can come in and fix the problem. With hosted exchange, customer support is a phone call or chat message away. Many companies offer 24/7 customer support.
There are many different options for hosted email exchange. Determine what your company needs, then compare the features, support, space and pricing models of several available hosts. Before making any final decisions, review the host’s service level agreement, which spells out what services are covered and what services are not covered. Some hosts help migrate data to the cloud, while others expect you to do it yourself. Some hosts retain ownership over your data if you cancel the service as a way to enforce a continued business relationship. Whatever host you decide to use, there are many benefits of moving to a hosted email server.