Why Businesses Should Select a Hosted Email Solution

Email is easily one of the most commonly (and most often) used business tools there are, but as with any tool, some options are better than others. This week, we’re giving you some tips on how to best use email in your business by using hosted email.

As you might imagine, your criteria for a business email should differ from what the average private email user may consider.

A personal email account, or one that a private user would likely make use of, has a few standard qualities:

• Free to use
• Limited storage space and features
• Generic Domain, like gmail-dot-com or outlook-dot-com

This is all just fine for a private user, but for a business’ purposes, these options fall short. Limited storage space alone would make email far less convenient for the business in question, the lack of features could complicate business processes, and the generic URL renders your communications unrecognizable at first glance. While “free” can be hard to argue with, the costs that you’re trading for that price tag make this option a non-starter.

Instead, a business will need more control over its email platform, which has led to many hosting their own Exchange servers. While this option works, it is not without its assorted challenges, such as:

• A need for greater technical skill and experience
• A larger time investment for set up and maintenance
• An increased chance of significant downtime
• Spam filtering will cost extra in time and finances
• All responsibility belongs to the business for upkeep and updates

Any one of these issues would be extremely costly on its own, never mind combined. Fortunately, there is another option, one that pairs the benefits of a local email server with the advantages of cloud email.

Hosted Email

Businesses now have enterprise-level hosted email solutions available to them that are commonly included in productivity suites. For example, both Google’s G Suite and Microsoft Office 365 have an enterprise-level email paired with each account. Utilizing these platforms can provide a plethora of benefits for your business, such as:

• No added infrastructure costs
• Scalable number of accounts
• No more email infrastructure management
• Unified billing
• Built-in productivity suites
• Built-in management and security
• No software licensing or maintenance
• Scalable storage
• Provided email backup
• Access from anywhere, at any time

Need a solid set of productivity solutions for a more business-friendly expense? Give our IT professionals a call at 586 258-0650 to discuss what SMART Services can do for you.