What is hosted Exchange

In the modern business environment, e-mail has become the primary means of communication, supplanting even the ever present PBX phone system. While the need for e-mail is undeniable, there are a variety of approaches that SMBs take to fulfilling that need, from bare bones POP mail to a full on in-house server deployment. There is a constant however, and it’s a common one in a tight economy - price constraints and the inherent limitations they impose on available features.

Certainly business considerations have driven e-mail development, growing from the simple ability to send ASCII text from one mainframe to another, to the full featured information and time management platforms we have come to expect. The client/server driven POP mail was an important advancement from UNIX e-mail readers; similarly, limitations of POP mail led to the development of IMAP technology, and so on.

Concerns over scalability and security prompted companies like Microsoft to create enterprise class e-mail applications, and today corporate e-mail is dominated by Microsoft's Exchange and similar solutions. Designed from the ground up for business, Exchange includes robust security, back up management tools, and a host of other business oriented features. Unfortunately, the cost of hardware, licenses, and the technical staff needed to run an Exchange server has prevented many SMBs from taking advantage of those benefits. Hosted Exchange service changes that equation, giving small businesses the power of Exchange at a fraction of the expected cost.

Hosted Exchange service simply means that a business outsources provisioning and management of the Exchange server to an application hosting provider. To start, this eliminates cost of entry barriers, allowing business to quickly and inexpensively adopt Exchange into the workplace. Ongoing costs of operations are also mitigated, by avoiding the need to purchase servers and software licenses, as well as hire staff to maintain the infrastructure. Hosted Exchange services are instantly scalable, and generally offer pay as you go price structures, which means that businesses only pay for exactly what they need. Contrast this with the usual technology upgrade cycle of paying for capacity and growing into it later.

The ancillary benefits of a Hosted Exchange solution are even more striking, with SMBs reaping significant advantages through the economies of scale offered by a high end hosting provider. Robust, fully redundant datacenters with 24/7/365 staffing, backbone connections to major carriers, and supplemental services like managed backup, anti-virus and intrusion protection, and managed load balancers and firewalls all add up to make a Hosted Exchange solution invaluable to businesses of any size.

If you’re worried that your business is at a disadvantage thanks to an outdated e-mail solution, you’re probably right. If you haven’t acted on those worries because of budgetary concerns, then outsourcing to a Hosted Exchange provider is the cost-effective answer.