Exchange email servers are a necessity in today’s business world, but they come with many tangible risks.
When your email server goes down, it can lead to damaging downtimes and data loss that affects business continuity and can cost a business thousands of dollars. Plus, you have to constantly maintain older equipment – equipment three years old or older – or even consider replacing it, especially since there is a higher chance of failure. In this context, a Hosted Exchange email platform becomes an immediate need to reduce risk of failure and ensure business continuity.
On-Premise High-Risk Exchange Servers
On-premise servers require constant investment, including software and hardware upgrades. Most businesses don’t have the required capital to continually pay for these upgrades, meaning that they’ll keep their Exchange servers for a very long time – sometimes longer than seven years. These older Exchange servers are now at high risk for failure.
While it might seem like a good investment to buy secondhand hardware, you may actually still be losing a lot of money if you consider the costs associated with a dip in performance. If you’re using an old hosted Exchange server, it takes the server a long time to send and receive messages. These seconds start to add up, leading to real loss in productivity.
Think about it from a sales perspective. A potential customer tries to contact you regarding a product or service. This email is filtered through an older Exchange server, which may get overloaded or even fail. The customer receives a bounce-back email. This leaves a bad impression of your organization, and the customer will go with someone else.
Hosted Exchange Benefits
Hosted Exchange provides both improved performance and cost savings for businesses over on-premise Exchange servers. The improvement in performance stems from using state-of-the-art infrastructure. Plus, you don’t need to worry about a budget for hardware maintenance, software upgrades and additional IT personnel. Your Hosted Exchange cloud service provider takes care of the hardware and maintenance costs, including having the most up-to-date patches.
Hosted Exchange comes with service level agreements (SLAs) that usually guarantee up to 99.999 percent uptime. This means that your service will be down no longer than 18 minutes, whether the downtime is planned or unplanned, in a single year. Your Hosted Exchange cloud service provider also has its own staff of highly skilled, dedicated professionals that are available 24 hours a day/seven days a week.
Outsourcing the task of dealing with downtime and hardware provides your IT department with more time to do the necessary work required to advance your business. Further, you can now use your IT budget not for maintenance and upgrade fees, but for new projects to stay competitive. You also don’t need to worry about email anti-virus protection. This is usually included in your Hosted Exchange package from your cloud service provider.
Once you eliminate your high-risk, on-premise Exchange Servers, anxiety about failures and business and data loss will be forgotten. You can also take advantage of other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to improve productivity, flexibility and collaboration, including Microsoft’s SharePoint, Lync and cloud office products. FBN
Stephen Lucas is senior product manager, savvisdirect, at Savvis, a CenturyLink company.