When it comes to business communications, there are good reasons why Microsoft Exchange Server has succeeded where many other platforms have fallen short. Tight integration with other MS Office applications, administrator friendly tools for automated backups and security functions, and with support for iPhone, Blackberry, and browser based access to e-mail and other key information, Exchange server is the communications backbone for SMBs of all sizes, from a small team to organizations with hundreds or even thousands of employees.

Choosing Exchange can be an easy decision, but the one that follows may not be-should you manage it in house, or outsource to a managed application host? For more and more businesses, outsourcing makes sense. Application hosting has come a long way in the last ten years. Once an afterthought for service providers, managed application hosting today is not only a vital revenue provider for hosts, it can also play a key role in any business plan.

Consider just the capital expense in deploying Exchange server in the business place. There are obvious costs like server hardware and software licenses. There are also secondary costs like personnel, training, and even additional bandwidth. Unless your business is in a position to leverage existing skill sets and infrastructure, chances are this will become a cost prohibitive effort.

There’s also the ongoing cost of operation to consider. Arguably out of all the IT systems needed to do business in the 21st century, corporate e-mail is the most dynamic, and also the most problematic on a day to day basis. A never ending tide of spam, virus threats, and malicious hackers are just one aspect of it. There are user generated issues to manage as well, from simple tasks like account creation, to more stress inducing duties like recovering a carelessly deleted mail, quarantining dangerous attachments opened by unsuspecting recipients, or retracting an embarrassing message accidentally forwarded to the entire company. It reads like material from a television comedy, but administrators deal with situations like this daily, and failing to do it efficiently can bleed budgets dry in hidden operating costs.

Which is why outsourcing Exchange Server to a managed hosting provider makes so much sense. Cost of entry becomes a non-barrier, which for practical purposes is the difference maker for most businesses considering Exchange. That cost savings goes much deeper however. Your managed host, if it’s a good one, has trained, application certified staff on site seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, delivering a level of support that would be otherwise impossible to afford.

A quality host will also offer the assurance of a fully redundant infrastructure with robust network connectivity. Enterprise class facilities mean performance and availability for your Exchange Server, but they also mean access to other services that add tremendous value to the equation. Managed firewall, network attached storage, customized backup services and other add ons can transform a plain vanilla mail service into a powerfully integrated high performance secure communications suite.

In a tight economy, outsourcing has gone from a novelty to a core business process, and the benefits of a managed Exchange provider demonstrate this in great detail. Managed Exchange not only delivers on the promise of superior communications technology for business, but it does so while providing a cost savings that will ripple throughout your entire organization.

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