Hosted Exchange Can Your Business Afford Not To?

By Nick J Davies

According to a Gartner research, one hour of e-mail failure can cost a company an average of $42 000 (which is approximately £26,000). This is a staggering amount, and I can see you making a simple comparison with your company´s case. In fact while differences may occur on a case-by-case basis, this is an estimate that is worth mentioning. Let´s add to that the fact that one-third of e-mail outages only get solved after 24 hours.

So let me challenge you on this one: consider that you won´t have access to your e-mail for 24 hours (let´s not count week-ends): how would that impact your work?

In fact, most users have become e-mail junkies nowadays. Let´s consider that you are not one of those users who would mix personal e-mails from professional e-mails (if you are, I strongly suggest you getting a separate personal e-mail account). Apart from communicating with partners, employees, government agencies as well as customers, e-mail is usually a tool most commonly used for the following purposes:

Storing important communications: more often than not, users have folders in their e-mail client where they store/archive their communications: be it e-mail, chat sessions, or attached files. This makes sense as this allows the IT managers to regularly get some backups in case a failure happens. However, the downside is that it tends to easily fill disk space and can get the user stuck when servers are down.Getting notifications: whether it is a reminder (and other calendar entries), or for confirming an appointment request. If you are using some modern e-mail and collaboration systems, then you and your partners can book appointments via Outlook (for example), then you can invite other people. Everyone who is invited to the meeting will then receive that invitation through their e-mail system. People regularly use that feature - now, consider that someone sends you a meeting appointment via e-mail while your e-mail system is down: this can lead to a very awkward situation.

So, indeed, we´ve come to a situation where we are all e-mail junkies: we have organised the way we work around e-mail. This means that we need to have a solution that is guaranteed to work all the time. This is what a Hosted Exchange solution does: it guarantees a 99.9% uptime. You may wonder why can´t they do 100%? And it´s a legitimate question. In fact, servers need to be brought down, restarted for maintenance purposes. This planned downtime makes it impossible to get a 100% uptime. But in order to get that high-level contract-sealed guarantee, one needs expert IT technicians as well as state-of-the-art IT infrastructure. Investments that are needed to get such quality of service are just out of budget for most Small Businesses.

This is where Hosted Exchange comes handy. As, not only does it guarantee you the highest uptime availability, but it also allows the end-user to rely on an e-mail system without having to worry about server issues.

Article Source: http://interpret.zar.vg

About The Author
Hosted Exchange by Giacom is available to businesses in the UK, Europe and beyond. Based on Hosted Exchange 2010 technology, features include collaboration, shared calendars, contacts, shared tasks, push email, and more.