For many organizations, IT is not their core competency; let alone managing email services. Business emails are their critical support mechanism. Most of the times, organizations who have setup in house email services underestimate email’s full cost to their organization.
In-house Email Solution
The cost of in house email is not just limited to licensing and hardware cost. It includes costs of staff, maintenance, storage, archiving, mobile email, etc.
- Maintenance and support
To calculate actual cost of software licenses, one should also include annual maintenance and support cost along with installation charges. Software up gradation costs are also significant and should be included in software licensing costs. - Storage and archiving
With mailboxes size increase and accumulation of attachments over the period, the cost of storage soar rapidly. Along with this archiving, business continuity, e-Discovery, and regulatory compliance add significant cost to email. - Staffing cost
For In house solution, you need have dedicated team to manage the operations. The resources are needed not only for general email administration but also to maintain sanity of servers and network, block SPAM and virus attacks, monitor hardware against failure, install latest patches or upgrades on servers, build redundancy in system etc. Each of these tasks needs a skilled resource who understands the mailing solution from end to end. - Hardware cost
The hardware cost is not limited no of servers or routers. The biggest contributor to hardware cost is the power and data center cost. - Redundancy
In house email solutions are not scalable easily. To add new users in system, administrator needs to scale up multiple systems such as data storage, servers, ancillary services such as anti-spam, backup and archiving, etc. To avoid last minute hiccups administrators, configure all these services in excess thus introducing redundancy in system. Also for business continuity, IT administrator has to make sure that they have redundant infrastructure in case anything breaks up.
If we consider all these costs for managing in house email services, the actual cost of email per user increases at least four times the cost of one email license.
Benefits of Hosted E-mailing Solution
In hosted mailing solution, customer need not to worry about the email infrastructure and its maintenance. The benefits of hosted mailing solution go beyond cost,
- Scalability
Using hosted mailing solution you can rapidly add new users. You don’t have to waste time in procuring licenses, provisioning mailbox space or setting up email accounts. Also hosted mailing solution can cope up with sudden increase in inbound or outbound email traffic easily. - Always up to date
The hackers and spammers are continuously inventing new techniques to invade into your mailing system. If your mailing system is not upgraded with latest security patch or upgrade, it can cause heavy damages to your business critical information. Rediffmail Pro email solution is always up to date with all the security updates and you don’t have to worry about security of your email data. - IT resource management
Cloud email service provider is managing your email solution, you can allocate valuable IT professionals to more business-centric projects. The opportunity cost of running email on-premise is that your staff must spend time on email support, rather than revenue generating projects is quite significant. - Secure email service
The reason for which most of the organizations opt for in house email solution is that they are worried about their data security and control over hosted email service. However, with cloud email service provider the data is transmitted using secure channel and moreover it is stored at a secured premises. Also hosted email solution provides inherent redundancy which makes sure that the data is replicated. Also you can control unauthorized email data transmission by defining user level restrictions and policies for their email usage. - Access to open technology
In house mailing solutions binds you to proprietary technology and protocols. This limits the access to advanced technology or devices. Even if the in house mailing solutions have a application to integrate with different devices or software, it comes with huge licensing cost. Hosted email services brings in value from the open world, which gives the business an IT edge to integrate with free clients and applications like Thunderbird, ERP systems etc. With open technologies, you could use any Android based phone/ pad/ tab, iPhone, iPad, to get seamless access to email, calendar and address book, while on the move. A possibility like this allows the field force to be more connected to each other and not just the top management.
