10 Jul 7 Reasons Companies Migrate To Hosted Exchange

By Sam Coyl, President

Below are seven common reasons our customers have cited with us when they migrate to hosted exchange from an in-house solution. If your business is experiencing any of these pains with your current in-house solution, hopefully this post can help you make the best decision to move your technology forward.

Consistent Reliability/Downtime Issues

Reliability and downtime issues are probably the most common reason we have received when customers switch from in-house to hosted exchange. In-house exchange solutions often lack redundancy and bandwidth, suffer from poor administration, or face security and performance issues due to a delay in upgrades.

When servers crash and e-mail gets interrupted, business is delayed and productivity is lost. In today’s economy, what business really has time for that?

Hosted exchange providers typically have:

• Specialized experts who are trained to perform updates
• An update schedule that allows for maintenance in a timely manner.
• SLA uptime guarantees
• 24/7 technical support
• Data backup

To Bring Down The Excessive Costs

Running an exchange server in-house is quickly becoming too expensive when compared to a hosted solution. With any in-house upgrade, there is a large, upfront financial investment that is often thousands of dollars to cover the hardware and software licenses. This also doesn’t take into account additional IT resources needed for an upgrade.

Oh, and in the event an in-house team runs into complications – the maintenance expenses are often unpredictable.

By, comparison, hosted exchange services:

• Have minimal initial costs and scalable, predictable ongoing fees
• Come with no need to purchase hardware or software
• Require no added IT personnel

The IT Staff Member Who Managed Exchange Left

Most business owners don’t think about this today because they’ve grown accustomed to having IT people on staff. But managing a typical email system for a 100 person company can take up as much as 85% of a senior technician’s time. Why you ask? Because of the constant vigilance required to manage complex security solutions to combat viruses and SPAM.

The day that individual who spent 85% of his/her workweek dedicated to managing your email system clears out their cubicle, your network almost instantly becomes “at risk”.

When your business deploys hosted exchange and your senior tech leaves:

• No dedicated IT resources are required for Microsoft Exchange.
• User maintenance can be performed by a non-technical person.
• All system management is performed by the hosted exchange provider. 
• Security services are available on demand.

Need To Free IT Staff Time To Focus Elsewhere

As I just mentioned above, an email system for a 100-person company can occupy as much as 85% of a senior tech’s work week. Also, when the time comes to upgrade an in-house solution, it can also average 30 days to deploy an messaging and collaboration with a dedicated staff.

Is your business having a hard time accelerating its technology evolution? Based on those two stats, I can clearly see why – your IT staff has no time to push things forward!

On the other hand, if you were to deploy hosted exchange:

• Your email solution could be started in minutes with a shared environment, or a few days more for a dedicated solution using your own domain.
• Your team could focus internally on improving other problem areas or streamlining your business operations with a variety of other advancements.

3 Other Common Reasons Companies Move To Hosted Exchange

• The Company Is Looking For Increased Mobile Device Support
• A Growing Company Is Looking For Advanced Email Capabilities At A Small Business Cost
• Need For Increased Collaboration Not Offered By POP3, IMAP, Or Webmail

Hosted exchange providers: what other reasons have you come across that caused your customers to move to hosted exchange? Share them in the comments below!

Companies that have deployed hosted exchange: is the reason you switched not listed above? Let me know why you switched in the comments.