Hosted Email Advantages
Secure Email Messaging
Over the past two decades, email has become the de facto communication tool for businesses. For new and growing businesses, setting email up properly using your own domain name is essential to establish credibility with your customers.
Security of your messaging has also become vitally important, as losing access to email, or allowing hackers access to sensitive customer data can have disastrous effects.
Safe Email Messaging
With the ever-increasing reliance, many business owners have been left wondering “how secure is email?” And fears are compounded by the regularity of stories in the press about security breaches, data loss and ransomware attacks.
Free email services like Gmail and Hotmail are particularly prone to attack from hackers, simply because of their visibility and widespread use. Tellingly, Google offers support and guidance on how to “recover a hijacked or stolen Google account”.
From a compliance perspective, you have a responsibility to protect any data that you collect from your customers, including anything stored in email.
Hosted Email
Increasingly, businesses are turning to hosted email services to run their email for them, as opposed to managing the infrastructure in house.
Large corporations will typically benefit from the hosted email advantages using solutions such as Microsoft Exchange to manage their own email, this generally doesn’t make sense for smaller businesses. A hosted email solution is usually a much more cost effective approach, requiring much less effort to manage.
In this model, a third party manages the email service, and provides you a mechanism to access your email via a secure web platform, or integration with traditional email clients like Outlook.
Hosted Email Benefits
There are very many Hosted Email Advantages, particularly with regard to business applications:
- Security – As mentioned above, security is paramount for business messaging services, and hosted email platforms can invest heavily in security protocols to keep your email safe.
- Reliability – With such heavy reliance on email, ensuring that you have a highly reliable service with minimal downtime is key. Hosted email services schedule regular maintenance windows to ensure that software patches are up to date, and use the latest disaster recovery principles to make sure that you’ll never lose your email. Further to this, hosted email providers will have engineers on call who can get the systems back up and running should any failure occur.
- Scalability – As your business grows, you want an email solution that will grow with you. Hosted email allows you to do this simply and inexpensively, without the need to purchase any hardware.
Flexibility – Using a hosted email server means that your email can be accessed directly from the web, and therefore you don’t need to be in the office, or with your work laptop to pick up email. This gives you the flexibility to read and respond to email from any location, using any web enabled device.
Another clear benefit of hosted email is the simple fact that you don’t have to worry about managing it yourself. It is one less thing for you to worry about, allowing you to focus that energy on the things that will help to grow your business.
You won’t have the overhead of purchasing and maintaining the physical hardware or the software upgrades, nor will you have to worry about how to scale the system in the future.
If you’re wondering how secure your current email solutions are and you’d like more information about the hosted email advantages could be applied to your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch.