Hosted Exchange
Emails are the lifeline of most businesses today if not all of them and hence having a robust and reliable messaging system in place becomes a necessity. It is a known and accepted fact that Microsoft’s Exchange server is the most reliable and hence most widely used messaging system in the world. Traditionally the Exchange server was deployed internally for most companies but with the arrival of Cloud Computing, Exchange server was the first thing to move to Cloud with great success. Here are the benefits and the reasons why it suits the best to small to medium sized businesses.
Cost: The upfront cost of running Exchange server with all required mobility options can easily cost anything from R60 000 to R100 000 for installation and licensing only, not forgetting the cost thereafter for maintenance of the server. Compared to that the overall cost for hosting the exchange service significantly much lower making it affordable for any size of business.
Reliability: Hosted exchange service is provided from world class data centres which have much more redundant resources e.g. internet connection, hardware in the servers etc. This means very low possibility of downtime compared to the internally hosted server.
Mobility: Hosted exchange service provides unparalleled mobility at very affordable cost. Different end users can have different mobility options e.g. out of the 5 employees in a company 3 can opt to have Blackberry service, one can opt for Good Mobile Messaging and the other one can have Microsoft ActiveSync based option. Internally hosted exchange service can also have such flexibility but at really high cost. Hosted Exchange service allows you to work from anywhere with transparent access to your emails.
Business continuity: Business continuity is often forgotten and difficult issue as it requires complex procedure and plans to be in put in to practice e.g. regular backups, sourcing redundant hardware etc. With hosted services, especially emails, business continuity is automatically built into the solution. The servers on which your emails are stored are clustered geographically so that even if the data-center was to have any issue, your emails are available to you from a different data centre. In the event where your company has an outage whether with the internet connections or the servers the users can easily login to their emails from any internet based computers, e.g. at home or even a cyber café.
Carbon footprint: Cloud Computing is also greener so using hosted Exchange service reduces your over all carbon footprints. The reason is simple; the computer hardware resources are used more efficiently in a hosted environment as opposed to a traditional server environment..