Companies are slowly gravitating towards hosted services to maintain business critical applications. Large numbers of organizations have moved to web or application hosting providers in order to lower the cost of ownership of these enterprise scale products.
The benefits of using a hosted service as opposed to managing it all are many.
The biggest advantage is that of cost. The upfront cost of building an enterprise level Exchange system is considerable. The server and network infrastructure is large and complicated and can need a lot of managing. Once the system is running, it has to be managed and maintained. That means a technician or engineer to keep things running. Depending on the size of the infrastructure it may need a team of them.
Having the system hosted means someone else has to worry about scaling, updates, repairs, licensing, upgrades, anti-virus, firewalls and upgrades. There is a lot of work involved in maintaining an IT infrastructure, most small to medium businesses are much better off outsourcing it to a competent vendor.
Exchange is the most popular corporate messaging system because it offers pretty much everything a company needs to keep in touch. It is a stable messaging platform that offers email, text messaging, fax from desktop, web mail in later editions and many more benefits to users.
To the company, it offers stability, centralized storage, scalability, reasonable security and manageability. It has decent anti-virus and anti-spam mechanisms, the Intelligent Message Filtering has become quite effective at filtering out most junk mail from users Inboxes. Not only does it reduce the overhead on the Exchange servers, it also reduces the time users waste sorting through them.
Security has been tightened in recent editions of Exchange. Each mail that now passes through can be encrypted, to prevent prying eyes discovering company secrets. The introduction of OWA, or Outlook Web Access was a significant step forward for Exchange. It meant that users didn’t have to be in the office to access their email. This gave much greater flexibility to a workforce and allowed staff on the road to keep in touch, wherever they were.
Later editions of Exchange also offer mobile integration, and will interface with Blackberry servers in order to fire email to handheld devices. This furthers the always connected ethos of the modern business. Now there is no excuse to not receive emails and be contactable. Not sure if that’s a good thing or not. Free time might be a thing of the past if this kind of technology keeps progressing.
Having Exchange hosted means there will be backups of everything and clustered servers to prevent downtime. The lower cost of ownership is a definite bonus to small and medium business. While someone else manages the system they can concentrate on other things. Exchange as a service can grow with them, as users can be added and paid for on a per seat basis.
Managing this infrastructure and everything that comes with it becomes someone else’s headache!
