Posted by Tony Rorai

In the current economic climate, IT Directors have to balance costs with the continuing march of technology more than ever. Prudent organizations know that standing still is the worst thing they can do, so the discussion becomes how to offload critical but non-strategic functions to free up resources and focus on core business priorities. The first of these functions that should be migrated to a hosting provider like NaviSite is Enterprise Email and Collaboration.

Get enterprise class email with minimal investment

Cost pressures are the top challenge IT managers are contending with in 2009. Personnel represent the largest ongoing cost associated with supporting an email and collaboration infrastructure, followed closely by hardware and software in terms of both capital expenditures and ongoing maintenance. Many organizations running Exchange 2003 are contending with the ongoing personnel costs for email, but have made a choice to defer hardware and software purchases in 2009, which may be a premature decision as Microsoft is retiring mainstream support for Exchange 2003 on April 14, 2009. On that date, organizations still on Exchange 2003 will have to make a choice of either staying on a legacy platform that will no longer receive updates outside of security, or upgrading to Exchange 2007. Upgrading from Exchange 2003 to 2007 requires new hardware, so that decision would include a large capital expenditure, something organizations would not like to carry out right now. Outsourcing e-mail needs allows organizations to upgrade to the new system for a predictable monthly fee, with no upfront hardware costs, and provides organizations with access to the latest hardware and software in the market without additional investments and without the risk of obsolescence.

Free up your time and resources with a secure inbox

Security threats are another key challenge for organizations. According to a Sophos press release from June 2008, the level of spam rose from 92.3% to 92.6% in the first three months of 2008, and corporations are facing the fact that only one in 28 emails are legitimate. Not only does this amount of unwanted email become a burden to your network in the form of higher bandwidth needs, it forces IT departments into a cycle of diagnosing and fixing problems with spam software and appliances instead of focusing on core business priorities. By outsourcing to NaviSite, this problem completely goes away.

NaviSite’s email hosting and collaboration solutions include:

• Firewalls custom-configured for your environment and fully monitored and maintained round-the-clock by NaviSite’s security engineers.
• Spam Filtering, so instead of wasting resources by paying for the bandwidth to receive spam, hard drives to store it, and staff time to manage it, our service stems the tide of junk email.
• Email Virus Protection, where NaviSite scans all message parts for the latest viruses and quarantines infected messages for review and disposal before they have an opportunity to invade your environment.
• Enhanced monitoring, where NaviSite proactively monitors messaging environments 24×7 to make sure applications, operating systems, and servers are all running properly by blocking invalid connection attempts and immediately detecting and responding to Directory Harvest Attacks and other threats before they can damage your environment.

Stay in touch with your business, anytime, anywhere

Although there are numerous other challenges when it comes to managing an email environment, the final key challenge we see is higher user expectations and limited resources. Unlike the recent past where email was strictly a communication tool, email now contains urgent customer orders, shipment notices, and other critical documents. Because of this, users require constant “dial-tone” availability and reliability, and expect email to be available all the time, day or night from their desktops, from the web, from mobile devices, from across towns, or across an ocean. 100% uptime isn’t an achievement anymore; it’s the expectation. NaviSite’s email and collaboration solutions are built on a world-class Enterprise Hosting platform with industry experts at each layer starting with the network, security and OS.  NaviSite’s Messaging Engineers bring a combination of expertise and operational excellence that has been demonstrated over 15 years of providing managed messaging services. This allows us to confidently offer uptime SLA’s that are among the highest in the industry, giving your users the dial-tone access they require while allowing your IT department to focus on core business priorities.

Reap the benefits of Hosted and Enterprise Email

Hosted and Enterprise email and collaboration with NaviSite makes good business sense today. Email continues to grow in size and complexity, and it continues to hold more and more information, requiring more and more bandwidth and storage. Spam shows no signs of slowing anytime soon, and security threats continue to jeopardize the safety of enterprise information. Combine these with the current economic climate, which deprives even the best IT departments of adequate resources to maintain service levels, and Hosted and Enterprise email and collaboration becomes the smart choice. The costs are lower, the headaches go away, service quality improves, security tightens, and perhaps most importantly, IT can focus on the strategic, higher profile projects that will help contribute to the bottom line success of their core business.

If you have any questions or need more information on NaviSite’s email hosting solutions, then contact the author of this article at trorai@navisite.com.

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