Not everything belongs in the cloud, but a large portion of businesses could benefit from moving email to the cloud.
My definition of CLOUD: The most over used buzz word of recent times. Putting that aside, some IT solutions just fit better with someone else hosting and maintaining that part of your business. Today, I am focusing on email.
Money: Yes, money talks. You can host email offsite for as little as $4.17 / month / user and a maximum of $10 / month / user. This isn't with some fly by night company either. We are talking about Microsoft and Google. Let's case study a company with 30 employees needing to upgrade their email server and say that the company replaces equipment precisely every 4 years. Option 1: Purchase new server and replace. Cost: Approximately $7500. (Server + Software + Licensing) . Option 2: Google apps domain: Yearly cost $1500 and total cost over 4 years is $6000 plus initial setup (man hours). Option 3: Microsoft hosted exchange: Yearly cost of $1800 and total cost over 4 years $7200 plus initial setup (man hours). Option 4: Microsoft BPOS: Yearly cost of $3600 and total cost over 4 years $14400 plus initial setup (man hours).
With the last 3 options, the best news is that after the first four years, your company is purchasing new equipment. You continue to pay your monthly fee and upgrades and improvements are added to your hosting solution in the cloud with out any intervention from your IT staff.
Maintenance: I am in no way saying the cloud is maintenance free, but I am saying that your IT staff will spend much less time maintaining the email hosted in the cloud once the initial setup is done. Think of this, the burden of backups, uptime, equipment and so on is now rolled up into a nominal fee you are paying.
Reliability: Service Level Agreement! What would it cost your company to place a redundant email system to a data center that offered very high speed internet and redundancy. I have recently priced this and $20k - $30k for hardware alone. Add on a $500 - $1500 monthly fee for the data center and internet. All this exercise was to get your SLA up to 99.9%. Or, when you buy a hosted solution, it comes with that SLA bundled in you low recurring fee.
Eat our own Dog Food: Not only do we recommend these solutions, but we use them too. Our corporate email is hosted with Microsoft BPOS. Personally, I have a Google apps domain for my family. I like both products and they both are reliable and quality products.
Ready to buy yet? If this peaked you're interest and you are ready to switch, give Strickland Networks a call. Not only can well help you chose the right solution, we can help you implement it as well.