There are many reasons to consider outsourcing your
organization's email versus keeping it in-house. Not only can
outsourcing save time and money, it also offers greater security
and reliability. For both small business owners and IT managers,
moving to an outsourced solution places the responsibility of
maintaining and managing the email infrastructure in the hands
of a trusted email hosting partner.
Many businesses initially build or buy an in-house mail server
in the interest of protecting their correspondence. However,
unless the server is properly maintained, an in-house server may
offer less security than a managed outsourced solution. At the
very least junk mail, viruses and attacks may unexpectedly grind
your email services to a halt. In a disaster scenario, an
in-house server hard drive failure could result in a total loss
of data.
Outsourced email offers a managed hosting solution and can
provide enterprise class reliability. In choosing an email
hosting partner, you should look for both network and storage
redundancy. The goal in building a redundant email platform is
to minimize points of failure and optimize the hosting servers
for email. To accomplish this, hosting companies employ
clustering technologies. A hosting cluster should include load
balancers, multiple mail servers, and raid array file storage.
Finally, an outsourced solution should include both nightly
mirrored disk backups and remote tape backups.
Most hosting providers base plan pricing on the number of email
accounts. Depending on your client application requirements, you
may want to confirm that the hosting platform supports both POP3
and IMAP protocols. For outgoing mail, check to make sure your
provider supports SMTP Authentication. An outsourced email
solution should also include an easy to use web based
administration panel, web mail, managed virus protection,
firewall security and spam control. Added features should
include mail forwards, vacation messages, auto-responders,
aliases and phone support.
About the author:
Adam Hayes manages Greatmail's
email hosting services.
Plans include virus protection, advanced spam filtering,
firewall protection, email forwarding and autoresponders. For
more information, please visit Greatmail on the web at
www.greatmail.com.
