Jul
24
2009

Why your Business Email needs a Top Notch Data Center

For most businesses operating in a web enabled marketplace, e-mail has replaced the phone system as the communications nerve center. If you don’t think so, imagine which one you could do without for a day. As one of a business’ most valuable and important resources, it presents some challenges when it comes to how and where to manage it. Commercial e-mail like Gmail or AOL isn’t an option for anyone that wants to be taken seriously, and unless you already have significant bandwidth, hardware, and 24-7 staffing, running it in house isn’t really an option.

The decision to outsource e-mail may be an easy one, but the implementation is much less cut and dry. Shared hosting versus dedicated, basic POP mail service versus full featured Exchange hosting, there are solutions to fit organizations and budgets of any size. Regardless of the solution you’re considering for your business, there’s a common question you should be asking- what kind of data center will my mail be hosted in?

In a very tangible sense, the data center is a tremendous portion of the overall value of a mail service, and yet, it is frequently the least considered one, lost is a sea of price points and feature sets. Often it’s the quality of the data center that makes the difference between poor and excellent e-mail service.
more

Jul
15
2009

Save CAPEX with Outsourcing Hosted Exchange

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.
more

• view all