The benefits of hosted email and Microsoft Exchange in your business
There’s no doubting the importance of email in running a company – messages zinged around the office, country or entire world at lightning speed and greatly enhancing productivity. It makes you wonder just how companies managed to operate without it.
As workforces become ever more mobile, being able to access your email while on the go is crucial, whether out in the field, on an overseas trip or just at home and want to check up on something or email a client or colleague.
Deciding, therefore, on what kind of email system to have is a critical factor in how a company and its employees will operate. Will the email system be run on an in-house network or be outsourced to a hosting company? Let’s look at what companies are doing today.
Recent research shows that a greater numbers of firms are opting for hosted email and exchange, largely due to significant cost savings, ease of access no matter where you are and uptimes that are practically guaranteed to be 100 percent. One survey, by market research firm Osterman Research, puts the number of companies in the United States using hosted email at 9.9 percent in 2012, rising to 13.2 percent in 2013 and leaping to 18.4 percent in 2014.
As for those financial savings, they’re huge: the costs of hosted email and exchange is just a fraction of running an in-house system, including the high cost of employing IT staff to manage systems.
There are other benefits too, because when firms make the change to cloud-based email, they get a range of other features that usually come as standard. These include scheduling tools, calendars, contacts facilities and more. In addition, as a company grows and takes on more employees, it’s easy to expand hosted email to meet changing needs.
One particular important consideration for firms is data backup and recovery, and with hosted email and exchange they get this option, so they can be sure they have access to their vital files and data at any time, even when things go drastically wrong.
