According to a study by Symantec and Gartner, most companies consider email to be a mission critical application. The study also stated, up to 75% of a company’s intellectual property resides in email and other messaging applications. Likewise, 75% of fortune 500 litigation involves email-related discovery. At the time of the study, 79% of companies accepted email messages as confirmation of transactions.

As critical as email is to most companies, it is important to remember that a company’s email servers are a part of the company’s infrastructure and are not usually related to the products or services that the company offers to its customers. In most cases, this infrastructure is necessary expense for doing business but does not directly produce revenue. By outsourcing, the company can reduces costs and ,at the same time, frees staff to focus on the company’s business objectives.

There is a certain amount of technical complexity associated with email server, such as Microsoft Exchange. With complexity comes added costs. The first cost you are likely to encounter is training your administrative staff to design, deploy, and maintain an effective email server environment. The second costs is the number of servers required to host email server in a secure and reliable manner

Each server comes with an initial hardware acquisition cost and the cost of the software licenses. There may also be costs related to anti-virus software, anti-spam software, and client access licenses. Additional costs come in the form of spare parts, overtime for administrative staff to ensure 24x7 reliability, and other maintenance related expenses.

Outsourcing your email hosting allows you to avoid the initial startup costs of deploying an enterprise email server environment and reduces the ongoing costs.