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.

Think of your e-mail server as a safe deposit box in a bank. Bank A is in a warehouse with sheet metal walls and roof, tucked away on a small road. Bank B is a large concrete facility, well lit and located at the intersection of several large highways. It doesn’t take an accounting degree to determine that Bank B presents a better option.

That example isn’t as extreme as it might appear. There’s a world of difference between a server located in the collocation room of the phone company and one in a custom built data center. N+1 redundancy, environmental control, dedicated UPS power, and around the clock technical staff are just a few advantages you get from a top quality data center. They are things that are transparent when everything works the way it should, but that mean the difference between a technician fighting for off hours access to an out of the way phone company central office or having a technician already on site and working on restoring your service.

There are also many intangible benefits to being located in a top notch data center, like multiple connections to backbone network providers. That highly meshed, high performance connectivity means the best possible experience for users, regardless of where their traffic originates. A quality data center will also boast such features as fully redundant, generator backed power, physical and automated security measures, and available ancillary services like data backup and recovery, managed firewalls, and load balancers.

The sum total of these things is performance and availability. Your e-mail server, or more accurately the information that lives on and moves through it, is as valuable to your business as actual revenue. Just as you wouldn’t entrust financial resources to a bank with a rundown building, it’s important to put that same consideration in choosing a ‘bank’ for your business e-mail service. There’s no substitute for an enterprise grade provider with world class facilities.

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Tags: business class email, hosted exchange, outsource hosted exchange, save money with outsourcing hosted exchange