Email is powerful, business communication tool – lose the facility for just a few hours and you know your company productivity will take a nosedive. It isn’t simply the loss of email service, it is the business and network risk associated with using emails, especially as emails are the primary delivery mechanism for viruses and a host of malicious code which will attack your network and even cause it to be shut down.
Many companies choose to use a hosted email service. A hosted email service is where the server running your email application is located off site in a dedicated hosting center. By leasing such a service, with or without using your own hardware, you are getting a highly efficient email service which is benefits from a very high level of uptime. Hosted email delivers enterprise class performance and protection because the hosting service protects the gateways with state of the art anti virus, anti spam and other security measures which the small to medium sized business is usually unable to afford.
Hosted email also helps to reduce your helpdesk and support costs as the hosting service is responsible for ensuring the email service is running. You can choose to run a standard email application, such as Microsoft’s Exchange or some other application, but no matter what you are running, by removing email management from to a hosted service, you will automatically enjoy a superior level of service and functionality.
With the increasing impact of legislation on businesses and the need for archiving and data protection and retrieval, you must be able to capture and store emails sent to and from the business. Financial regulation is extremely hard to comply with, while laws such as Sarbanes Oxley (known as “Sox”) cover almost every business in the country, including those overseas which are connected to, or are doing business in the United States. A hosted email service will be able to provide cutting edge technology to ensure that emails are stored (even when deleted by the user), and provide a full audit trail and searchable archive which you can use in the event of an audit or legal dispute.
By hosting the email server off site, you are also improving the disaster recovery plan which every business needs to ensure the operation can continue in the event of a serious incident. By ensuring your email service is hosted away from your operations site, you can still use your email even if your offices or business premises are knocked out of commission by a fire, adverse weather or a break in for instance.
Hosting your email service offsite will deliver cost benefits and improve the performance and utility you currently enjoy with email. A hosted email service is likely to increase your Return on Investment (ROI) because you need not invest large lump sums of capital to gain access to enterprise class services and protection. The low initial investment required brings the enhanced and more reliable email into the range of every small and medium sized business and allows you to benefit from a service level standard, which many mistakenly believe, is only available to the largest companies with huge budgets.
Author Resource:
Lawrence Reaves is a strong believer in Richmond IT Services such as Richmond enterprise storage and Richmond business email services. For these services, Lawrence recommends PLANIT Technology Group. PLANIT can be found online at: http://www.planittech.com .
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