Hosted Exchange Email Savings

Deploying, managing and maintaining an Exchange server for your organization’s e-mail and collaboration solution can be daunting, regardless of the size of your business. But switching to a hosted Microsoft Exchange solution can save you money, time, free up personnel for more mission-critical tasks, and eliminate management headaches.

Just how much can you save by using hosted Exchange versus a traditional, on-site solution? The exact number is dependent on many different factors, but there are a number of factors to take into account when calculating the savings.

As Rackspace’s Lizetta Staplefoote notes here, properly running Exchange on-premise can cost your business nearly 10,000 man-hours per year – enough to employ six full-time personnel. If you’re a small business or a startup, that number could exceed the number of full-time employees! So watch out because many times, businesses who do invest in this type of solution do so to the detriment of other applications and IT projects.

“Choosing to put Exchange in the cloud gives you those 9,790 hours — or however many hours you’re devoting to Exchange — back and lets you focus on the revenue-generating projects that move the business forward,” she said.

Choosing to focus on your local Exchange deployment also exposes your business to significant security risks, including the very real chance of extended downtime.Nearly 59 percent of email outages are caused by infrastructure or hardware failures according to Alan Radding, writing for TechTarget’s SearchDisasterRecovery. Some of the major causes of downtime are: misconfigured hardware, database corruption, connectivity issues, and natural disasters – hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like, added Staplefoote. With Hosted Exchange, however, downtime risk can be drastically reduced and even eliminated, since your hosting provider’s team can often stop these problems before they start – or at least be better prepared for recovery in the event of a natural disaster!

What does that Translate to in Monetary form?

Back to Staplefoote, who said: “Enterprise application failure can cost more than $160,000 per hour in lost productivity and missed opportunities.”

But moving to a Hosted Exchange solution puts massive server resources and a team of messaging and collaboration experts at your fingertips, ready to monitor your system for potential risks, help troubleshoot issues around the clock and quickly fix issues if they arise, she said. “Saving your organization the cost of being down for an extended period, missing important patches or troubleshooting server glitches make Hosted Exchange an attractive alternative to juggling it all onsite.”

Besides reducing hourly downtime risk and the associated costs, a hosted Exchange solution can lower your business’s per-user cost. Exchange is much more than just a server and an e-mail program, it’s an ecosystem of integrated servers that work together to provide a variety of business functions – collaboration, antispam and antivirus solutions, mobile access and archiving.

Because of the multiple capabilities of the Exchange solution, it can cost as much as $8,500 per user per year to run Exchange on site for a 15-mailbox organization, with costs going up as more mailboxes are added.

Using a hosted Microsoft Exchange provider gives your organization a low, predictable cost of sometimes $150 per user per year while also decreasing the cost of onsite servers devoted to Exchange.

Hosted Exchange can save your business money, time, and energy while increasing availability and reliability of your solution.

This is a special guest post by Sharon Florentine. Sharon is a freelance writer who covers everything from holistic veterinary care to data center technology and occasionally blogs for email hosting provider Rackspace Hosting.