For companies with strapped and/or non-existent IT teams, outsourcing Microsoft Exchange can be an extremely smart, cost-effective option. While the hosted email market is indeed growing fast, a few stubborn myths continue to hold back many businesses from embracing it as a viable option to an in-house solution. In this article we will debunk those falsehoods one by one to show why a hosted Exchange model is the best choice for smaller organizations.
Hosted Vs. In-House for Microsoft Exchange: Five Myths DebunkedEmail has become the single most important tool for business communication, period. In a recent King Research survey of mid-market IT professionals responsible for messaging systems, 96 percent of re-spondents said email is important or extremely important and has a significant negative impact on business operations when not available. According to Osterman Research, one in five organizations believes a single major email outage could result in revenue losses up to $500,000. Even more telling is the claim by management consulting firm Eagle Rock Alliance that a whopping 40 percent of compa-nies that go more than 24 hours without access to their data go out of business. Out of business.
Given the above statistics, it's not surprising that a 2006 Skillsoft survey found that 97 percent of IT pros report daily stress stemming from user complaints, managers and deadlines. And these are trained IT professionals, a staffing luxury that many smaller companies simply don't have. For small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), businesses with 500 and fewer employees, lucky enough to have an in-house IT team, keeping email up and running is just one of the many responsibilities these busy individuals must stay on top of, joining security, database, Web and network administration, to name but a few. In fact, managing Microsoft Exchange (the industry's leading email, calendaring and unified messaging server) takes away from running the businesses' core applications and prevents the IT manager from taking a strategic role in IT planning.
For companies with strapped and/or non-existent IT teams, outsourcing Microsoft Exchange can be an extremely smart, cost-effective option. Gartner predicts the market for hosted email relative to total email seats to grow to from its current 1 percent up to 20 percent by 2012, representing 40 million hosted mailboxes within the next four years.
While the hosted email market is indeed growing fast, a few stubborn myths continue to hold back many businesses from embracing it as a viable option to an in-house solution. In this article we will debunk those falsehoods one by one to show why a hosted Exchange model is the best choice for smaller organizations.
MYTH #1: There is less risk of downtime with an in-house Exchange solutionTRUTH: Most in-house solutions are comprised of a basic environment with one or two servers that have little or no redundancy to the Internet, no backup systems, and no disaster recovery solution in place. Many smaller organizations simply don't have the budget or resources to implement and manage these initiatives, so they don't even try, instead employing a precarious "let's cross our fingers and hope nothing goes wrong" approach. As a result, according to Gartner, the average business running an in-house messaging solution suffers 40 hours of unplanned outages per year, on top of two hours per month of planned outages for maintenance. Osterman Research says the majority of email outages are caused by unplanned technological failures, and www.Disaster-Resource.com says 29 percent of outages last from four to 24 hours. Compare those figures to the ones discussed at the beginning of this paper, and you are looking at a significant amount of risk with an-house solution.
Learn more at Top-of-the line hosted Exchange providers, on the other hand, connect their customers to their www.intermedia.net2own world-class Exchange infrastructures, offering clustered high availability, redundancy, backup and disaster recovery. This protects small organizations lacking an IT department from the pain of unplanned downtime, which can severely damage a company's revenue, not to mention its relationships with customers and partners-and its reputation. A service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.999% uptime is now the industry standard for hosted Exchange providers, regardless of the number of subscribers.
MYTH #2: An in-house Exchange server is more secure than a hosted solutionTRUTH: For a business without a dedicated, in-house IT professional to monitor the security of its network, in-house Exchange solutions have less physical security, digital security and backup security than hosted solutions. Every month Microsoft releases patches for Exchange and the Windows operating system it runs on, and in some months that number reaches 25 or more. That mea... [download for more]
