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Most companies in the Fortune500 use Microsoft Exchange Email, with Outlook and Outlook Web Access, and it's widely accepted that Exchange the best solution for email, calendar, task and contact sharing and collaboration. By using Exchange from Microsoft, businesses have gained significant efficiency advantages and have improved their working practices. Until now, these benefits were only available if you had your own Exchange or Small Business Server, but for many companies the Hosted alternative makes a lot more sense. Today Hosted Exchange solution allow you to gain the benefits of Exchange without the complexity and upfront investment and high costs of having your own server. The hosting provider look after the hardware and software and you simply connect to it via the internet. With Microsoft Exchange now being offered by many ISP's, and competitors, such as Google, selling competing products the cost of these hosted services is falling. It has never been a better time to consider using a hosted solution. New hosted exchange features provide great support, scalability, mobility service. Cost The upfront investment and high maintenance costs of a single Hosted Exchange account is now under R80 per user per month. When you compare this monthly fee with the cost of the in-house server hardware and required licenses to run your own Exchange, or Small Business Server, this is tremendous value for money. Do not forget the hard to measure costs of having your own server. You can think of electricity, support and administration hours, but also costs of higher downtime, and devaluation of your hardware investment. Simplicity An in-house Exchange server solution needs to be installed, setup and configured. These tasks will take an experienced professional many days to complete. With a hosted Exchange solution there is no server to setup. All you need to do is setup the account in Outlook 2010 or 2007. With an in-house Exchange server solution you have to perform all the upgrades to next versions of Service Packs of Exchange. And again - this costs more in terms of licenses, support and maintenance man hours and risk of downtime is far higher due to lack of redundancy. With Hosted Microsoft Exchange this all happens in the background: when the next version is released you receive it. No new licenses, no engineer time, no hassles. Great Support Setting up hosted Exchange may be something you don't feel comfortable doing yourself. By opting to use a Hosted Exchange provider, you can be assured that trained and certified experts will help you with any setup and support queries. Predictable Monthly Payments With your own in-house Exchange server, future costs will fluctuate a lot and therefore it’s hard to difficult to budget these costs. Any issue that your Exchange server will have, will cost you more money to solve. Not to mention the cost of guaranteed down-time to your business. With Hosted Exchange you pay a set monthly cost, making the Communication costs very simple and predictable. Disaster Recovery Redundancy is something you should be worried about with an in-house Exchange server. What would you do if your on-site Exchange server refuses to start up, or it was destroyed or damaged in a fire? If you have good backups a restore is possible, although it will cost time and money. If you don't have any backups chances are that you will never get your data back. Using Hosted Exchange disaster recovery is not an issue. Why? Exchange runs on geo-redundant datacenters. That means your data is not restricted to a single server in a single physical location. So, even if your ISP lost one of their data-centers (as hard as that would be) this redundancy will make sure that your data would be safe and your service uninterrupted. Business Class Security With an in-house Exchange server you will have the responsibility of getting the Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam software. This means additional costs. With Microsoft's Hosted Exchange you will get Anti Virus and Anti Spam automatically. Up Time Guarantees If you have your own server, will it always be running? With an in-house server you are going to experience down time due to power failures, lack of redundancy and configuration/maintenance downtime. This costs you money in support (to get the issue resolved) and loss of earnings. With Hosted Exchange, most ISP's will provide an SLA with a 99.9% up time guarantee. An on-premise server solution would struggle to reach 95% uptime. Scalability With an on-site server you can cope with the number of users you expect. There is room for some scalability but at some point the physical hardware will limit you. In addition, a Small Business Server solution also has a limit on the number of devices and users it can support. Soon you will have to re-evaluate the hardware and software requirement, which means, more money to invest. With a hosted solution scalability is no problem. Do you need 1 or 100 additional users? Either way just creates the accounts and you are done. Mobility The workplace is getting more an more mobile due to an increasing variety of devices, the Outlook client on a office computer, Outlook 2010 from a personal laptop, iPhone, Blackberry, tables such as iPad or Galaxy, etc. An inhouse server can do this, but when a new device is released you need to upgrade your exchange server. This means spending more money again just to support this device. With Hosted Exchange you will always have the latest version, and benefit from the best connectivity options available. A new device will not come with any extra expense. Green Then there is the environment argument last but certainly not least. Hosted solutions are always ‘greener' than an in-house solution. How? If you run your own Exchange server for a few users, the changes are that your server hardware utilization is not running at a high percentage. This means there is power being used to keep the server up and running, but a lot of that power is being wasted on a server not utilizing the full potential. The Hosted Exchange server will always have perfectly utilized servers. It the efficient use of server hardware and power that makes the hosted exchange services much greener. Considering all the above, and taking into account the lower cost of fast internet connections for both business and home use, hosted services are proving to be a real success.
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