Businesses still choose email systems over the new short-form of communication platforms such as chat & social-networking apps. According to market research firm The Radicati Group (PDF), the total number of business and consumer e-mails sent and received each day worldwide will hit 269 billion in 2017.

The “E-mail Use 2017 – EMEA Report” (PDF), a report commissioned by Adobe Systems Inc. and carried out by market research firm Advani’s, revealed that e-mail, followed by face-to-face conversation, is the most common primary communication tool used by businesses.

Emails are used for various reason in the business or personal environment such as:

1. Getaway to the online world

All online communication platforms, e-commerce shops or banks for their online banking services require a valid email address for verification and communication purposes.

2. Notification Purpose

According to The Radicati Group, the business community, as well as with consumers, prefers email as the primary mode to send or receive notifications.

3. Used for Quick Questions & Work Discussions

As per the Adobe-Advani’s report, email is one of the way of communication along with phone call and face-to-face conversation when it comes to asking quick questions. The report also showed that the most appropriate communication methods, for many different types of work discussions, are emails and face-to-face conversations.

Businesses have two options to host their email systems, either In-House or Cloud-Based.

In-House Email Server:

It refers to the hardware and software program that host office applications, including email, file sharing and other office essentials.

Traditionally, small and medium-sized businesses rely on an in-house server as cloud-based services were not viable options a few years back. For an in-house email server, your company needs capital investment. Your company needs to invest in hardware and infrastructure, including space – a room or closet – for the email server. You also need a dedicated IT support to troubleshoot on-premise email infrastructure.

The advantage of an onsite e-mail system is that your company has physical control over this e-mail server. As such, critical data are kept in-house, and no third party has access to your organization’s information. This system, however, does not guarantee uptime – defined as the period when the e-mail system is being used without any problems.

“The e-mail server has always been the most critical piece of a typical SMB [small and medium-sized business] IT infrastructure,” the International Data Corporation (IDC) said in the report “How the Hosted Exchange Server is Redefining SMB Cloud IT Adoption.”  “From a single server sitting underneath an office manager’s desk to one in a closet of like-sized servers partly or fully virtualized to a fully built out datacenter, supporting email has been the top mission-critical responsibility for IT management.”

Cloud-Based Email Service:

The cloud-based e-mail service has the following benefits:

1. No Capital Investment Needed

This e-mail system does not require onsite capital investment in hardware and infrastructure. This is suitable if your company outgrow your infrastructure too quickly.

2. Accommodates Mobile Devices

With the cloud e-mail system, your staff can have email access from wherever they are, using any smartphone, tablet or laptop. Your company can implement bring your own device (BYOD) policies.

3. Reduces In-House Server Load

Migrating your organization’s e-mails to a cloud-based service is one of the ways to reduce the load on your in-house server.

4. Minimizes Data Loss

In the cloud e-mail system, data is backed up regularly. This minimizes data losses against some of the worst-case scenarios, including natural disasters or critical failures due to malicious software, also known as malware.

At GigE IT Solutions, we recommend updating your organization’s ageing e-mail system to newer, more efficient platforms such as Microsoft’s Office 365.

Here are a couple of the advantages of having Office 365:

1. Office 365 Frees Up Considerable Staffing Resources

No more late night troubleshooting an in-house email server. Aging in-house e-mail server has to be individually managed, troubleshoot, and patched on-site. Office 365 enjoys the benefits of instant updates that do not require individual patching.

“The value of this in the eyes of these managers cannot be overstated, as they have spent many weekends and late nights troubleshooting on-premise infrastructure,” IDC said. “Their quality of life, both at work and personal, dramatically increases.”

2. Office 365 Offers Stringent Security

Office 365 has built-in malware and spam filtering capabilities that protect your organization’s inbound and outbound messages from malicious software and spam – unsolicited (mostly unwanted) e-mail messages. Your organization’s e-mails are also automatically encrypted when they’re stored and when they travel over the network.

Every business has a few basic requirements that needs to be done, irrespective of its domain of work. From accounting related work like bookkeeping, invoicing, or email, VoIP, or project management, file sharing, data storage or time tracking any business needs these at some point of time. Modern days businesses have started using cloud based solutions to fulfill these requirements.

According to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 18% in 2017 to total $246.8 billion, up from $209.2 billion in 2016.

“While some organizations are still figuring out where cloud actually fits in their overall IT strategy, an effort to cost optimize and bring forth the path to transformation holds strong promise and results for IT outsourcing (ITO) buyers,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. “Organizations are pursuing strategies because of the multidimensional value of cloud services, including values such as agility, scalability, cost benefits, innovation and business growth. While all external-sourcing decisions will not result in a virtually automatic move to the cloud, buyers are looking to the ‘cloud first’ in their decisions, in support of time-to-value impact via speed of implementation.”

Here are some of the reasons why more organizations are shifting to cloud based solutions for their businesses:

1. Increased Productivity

Cloud based solutions eliminates the hassles involved in install and maintaining an on-site hardware solutions. It also eliminates software installation, software patching and other miscellaneous IT management tasks. Giving the staff the a chance to better use their time on more important business tasks.

2. Flexibility

Cloud based solutions are designed with self-service and on demand services. For example, a massive amount of computing resources – more storage, computing power, bandwidth – can be provisioned or given to your organization in just minutes, with just a few clicks of the mouse. In a similar manner, lesser computing resources may be given to your organization upon request.

These provisioning and deprovisioning of computer resources in cloud based solutions collectively gives the “flexibility” – a process in which a cloud system adapts to the workload of your organization by provisioning or deprovisioning computing resources.

3. Secure & Dependable

The best cloud computing services run on a worldwide network secure data centers, which use regularly upgraded, state-of-the-art computing hardware. This ensures continuous delivery of cloud based solutions.

Many cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure, offer as part of their data storage packages geo-replication – referring to the replication of your organization’s data within the same data center or to a second data center. Geo-replication protects your organization’s data and applications in case of hardware failures or other calamitous failures in the primary datacenter.

4. Pricing options

Imagine the racks of servers to be bought, the IT team to manage the on-site datacenter and the 24/7 electricity for power and cooling the equipment. Hence it is not a cost effective option for small and medium-sized businesses to set up and manage one’s on-site datacenter. Cloud based solutions lessens the overall IT cost by removing the need to install an expensive hardware and software. Since cloud based solutions are flexible you are charged as per the plan you choose either per user or the parameter involved.

At GigeE, we help many businesses across Canada by providing them cloud based solutions for:

• Accounting
• Invoicing
• Payroll
• Time Tracking
• Bookkeeping
• VoIP/Telephony
• File Sharing
• Emails
• CRMs
• Data Storage
• Data Security
• Project Management

Call 888-366-4443 for more detailed information on our services.