Traditionally, large-scale companies have always hosted their email systems on local servers. Although this offers a high level of control and internal security, local email servers can be risk heavy, as well as expensive and complex to manage in-house.
Contrary to popular belief, email is far from dead. In fact, it still remains the de facto means for communicating within a business environment. For small to medium businesses (SMBs) and large-scale enterprise companies alike, cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) email providers are more effective in both the short and long term.
Problems with On-premise Email Hosting
In order to best understand the benefits of cloud-based email hosting, let’s look at the downsides of an in-house service:
- Expensive:
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- It’s no secret that local
email hosting
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- is expensive to manage. When something goes wrong with a server or it needs a significant upgrade, the cost is on the shoulders of the company hosting it.
- Risk-heavy:
Hosting your email locally comes with a wide range of risks, with the chief ones being data security and stability. In the event of a data disaster, your IT personnel will be responsible for ensuring that the email server stays active and available. Internal disaster recovery plans are resource heavy and can put a significant strain on your IT budget.
- Complex Management Requirements:
Lastly, on-premise email servers are incredibly complex to manage. This is especially true for enterprise organizations with hundreds or thousands of email users. Additionally, managing email backups on an internal server increases this complexity even further.
Benefits of Cloud-based Email Hosting
Moving your email hosting to the cloud comes with a wide range of advantages:
- Easy to Use:
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- Chief among the advantages of cloud-based email is its user-friendly accessibility. Backups are simple and can usually be completed within a couple of clicks. Plus, all your email hosting processes can be easily managed within a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
- Cost-effective:
Since you’re offloading the bulk of the hosting risk to a third-party SaaS-based email provider, costs are exceptionally low. On local servers, you’re usually locked into proprietary email server applications such as Microsoft Exchange or other resource-intensive solutions. Cloud email hosting frees you up from all the costs of running and operating an internal email server.
- Scalability:
As your organization experiences rapid growth or massive increases in email usage, you can easily scale up your email server capabilities without overloading your servers. Since all the email data and processing activity is spread across several shared servers, taking on a larger scale of activity can be easily accomplished.
Finding the Right Provider
Now that you’ve weighed the pros and cons, it’s time to start shopping for a cloud-hosting provider. This isn’t always easy because not all email-hosting providers offer the same services. Make sure any hosting provider you consider has a solid track record of data recovery, stability and scalability. Look into their instances of down time and make sure they have a long history of high availability. You can’t afford to offload your email system to a cloud provider who can’t deliver a cost-effective, scalable system.
