Email is now an essential business tool, so downtime is a serious problem. This is why companies are increasingly turning to 'hosted' Microsoft Exchange. Here are four compelling reasons:
TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP
As well as vastly superior uptime, quick implementation and easy maintenance, hosted Exchange also offers smaller companies a much lower total cost. Consider the following comparison:
| Total cost of solution over 2 years for 25 users |
In-house Exchange solution |
Hosted Exchange from Us |
| HARDWARE/SOFTWARE |
| Front-end Server |
$2,000 |
Included |
| Exchange Server hardware |
$2,000 |
Included |
| Backup domain controller |
$2,000 |
Included |
| Windows 2003 Server license |
$999 |
Included |
| Bandwidth |
$500 |
Included |
| LICENSING |
| Windows 2003 User licenses |
$800 |
Included |
| Anti-virus |
$750 |
Included |
| BACKUP HARDWARE/SOFTWARE |
| Backup server |
$2,000 |
Included |
| Backup software |
$1,000 |
Included |
| PERSONNEL |
| Administrators/Technical support ($40,000/year salary) |
$80,000 |
Included |
| TOTAL COST OVER 2 YEARS: |
|
Total Cost : |
25 users @ $10 /user/month |
|
$88,453 |
$6,000 |
Hosted Exchange saves $82,000 over 2 years, with better reliability and immediate implementation
ENTERPRISE-CLASS TECHNOLOGY AND UPTIME
Very few companies have in-house the qualified staff or enterprise-grade Exchange infrastructure to prevent downtime. In fact, around 70 per cent of businesses suffer downtime of some kind each year, which conservatively costs an average of $42,000 per hour, according to Gartner Research.
With redundant power supplies, cooling and Internet connectivity, plus clustered servers and a SAN for storage, datacenters providing hosted Exchange solutions guarantee an outstanding 99.9 per cent email uptime.
Hosted Exchange technicians are also focused on keeping specific servers running 24x7, rather than working on a range IT hardware and software. As a result, they can guarantee the reliability your company deserves.
EASY AND COST-EFFECTIVE MOBILE EMAIL
Running separate email and wireless email servers can be an expensive nightmare, as they are often in different locations and require skilled teams to keep them online.
Our hosted Exchange datacenter also runs BlackBerry and GoodLink servers, so getting hosted Exchange email on a BlackBerry or Treo is simple. Just 'switch on' the service and it works. There's no tricky configuration, no expensive hardware or software to buy (like BlackBerry Enterprise Server), and no maintenance needed.
CONTINUOUS PROTECTION
15,000 new viruses and security threats were discovered last year alone. Even so, with overstretched staff and resources, in-house IT teams with even the best intentions often fall behind on back-ups or updating anti-spam and anti-virus software.
With hosted Exchange, this is never a problem. Back-ups are performed on a regular and scheduled basis, with the latest anti-spam and anti-virus updates constantly applied across all servers. Given today's huge array of IT security threats, you can outsource Exchange just to have confidence that you are shielded from the crippling loss of your entire email system.