Owning and managing your own hosted email infrastructure can be a double-edged sword. On one side, you have absolute control over your email operations, but on the other, there are technical, financial and sometimes emotional costs involved. An IT team equipped with four-leaf clovers and tissue boxes may not be the best approach. Luckily, there’s the option of outsourcing, which eliminates the common pain points of managing your own email infrastructure and still leaves you with control over the service you offer your customers. Here are some key points to consider if you’re on the fence about outsourcing your email:
Servers on servers
Every email needs a home. That’s where servers come in (and lots of them). To have operational email, servers need to be tough and reliable enough to handle whatever you throw at them. Setting up and maintaining servers involves major resources, especially if you’re running hardware older than that forgotten can of soup I left underneath the car seat decades ago. If your setup is old, you can expect issues like breaking fans and disc failures (hardware refresh doesn’t come cheap). Outsourcing has the potential to eliminate the worry about the maintenance, upkeep, and reliability of servers.
Refocusing your team
Running email requires substantial time and resources from your support, ops and IT teams. When things go sour (and they will), finding a solution pulls your teams away from their priorities to focus on the problem at hand. Because email does not wait for a team lead to come back from their long weekend for things to go wrong, ensuring reliability often involves refocusing or restructuring your teams, which can be challenging. Outsourcing allows your teams to focus on the strategic aspects of your business, assured that your email infrastructure is in good hands.
Additional features and services
Like a burger, email is not email without all the fixins. Let’s use spam filtering as an example. It’s responsible for protecting all inbound/outbound mail from malware, viruses, and requests from wealthy princes looking to make generous donations to lucky recipients. A feature like spam filtering requires configuration, integration, and resources. In some cases, the associated costs could amount to more than that of the actual mailbox itself. With an outsourced solution, features are typically added with no additional costs.
Scalability
Scaling is much easier when you don’t have to do it (like everything else in life). As a company grows, it becomes an increasingly difficult task to ensure the technology scales at the same rate. For example, if you have outgrown your server, having to build/configure one from the ground up could end up costing you. Besides, mailbox sizes are only increasing, so it’s good to have something solid in place to avoid problems down the road. Outsourcing relieves all the growing pains that a company would typically go through, as it adds new technology and security enhancements to ensure the email infrastructure is future-proof.
Cost effective alternatives
It’s no secret that operating your own email service is expensive, which begs the question why we devoted so much time to explaining it! Well, having a reliable email provider (like us) can help reduce the costs and time associated with maintaining an email infrastructure. No need to pay for server management, hardware costs, upgrades, features and more. In addition, outsourcing allows you to allocate resources to other places within your business. There’s no need to set aside money for email-related problems.
Once you take a step back and evaluate all that is involved in running your own email infrastructure, it’s plain to see that it can all add up. If you’re debating that generation-old question, “to outsource, or not to outsource?”, we hope the key points highlighted above help you make the right decision for your company. That being said, there are valuable gains to be made by simply having a provider take care of the heavy-lifting. It gives you the freedom to take care of what’s important for your business. Do you know how much it costs to run your in-house email operation? If you don’t, we need to talk.