| Feature |
On-Premise Email |
Cloud-Based Email |
Storage |
Spiraling Storage Costs.
As your email volumes grow, generating more and more messages per day as well
as larger email attachments, you need to continually add more server capacity.
When your future growth is uncertain, this becomes even more challenging.
|
Predictable Costs.
Cloud-based solutions leverage the latest and greatest storage technology,
shielding customers from the complexity of storage growth and management, while
providing them with the best technologies possible as soon as they are
available.
|
Pricing |
Heavy Upfront Investment.
Traditional, on-premise solutions have heavy upfront costs, unpredictable
expense spikes (often associated with annual software licenses), storage growth
fees, server and equipment failures, and ongoing maintenance costs. |
Pay-As-You-Go, Monthly Pricing.
Cloud-based solutions offer predictable, monthly pricing, generally charged on
a flat per user, per month basis (often between $10 and $15 for each mailbox).
This makes budgeting easier and streamlines your cash flow, since you don’t
have to worry about depreciation of expensive upfront capital expenses. |
TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) |
Capital Expense.
With on-premise messaging solutions, you need to budget for significant
hardware and software capital expenses. Additional costs come in the form of
spare parts, overtime for administrative staff (especially if you want 24–7–365
reliability) and other maintenance-related expenses. |
Operating Expense.
With cloud-based email solutions, there are no initial upfront commitments for
infrastructure, hardware or licensing, and ongoing IT costs are minimal, so the
returns are immediate, which results in much faster payback periods. |
Deployment Time |
Weeks or Months.
Because of the upfront capital investments, it takes several weeks or even
months to properly setup and configure most on-premise solutions. |
Days.
Customers can deploy cloud-based solutions in days, rather than weeks or months,
because there is no hardware or software to install and provision. |
Enterprise Class Infrastructure |
Not Practical for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses.
The cost and complexity of implementing backup and recovery systems,
local clustering and high availability, and offsite replication of archives to
a disaster recovery site is overwhelming for many companies to handle
internally. |
Table stakes for Multi-Tenant Environments.
Cloud-based messaging providers offer high availability to all of their
customers and invest millions of dollars to build secure and reliable
infrastructures. This usually includes server clusters and other forms of
redundant hardware to ensure the cloud-based solution is always available.
Plus, cloud email customers usually benefit from geographically dispersed,
SAS-70 II Tier-4 compliant data centers, full redundancy and 99.99% network
availability. |
IT Expertise |
Lack of Messaging Expertise.
Estimates suggest that IT labor makes up approximately two-thirds of messaging
costs. Even a “simple” Exchange Server deployment is complicated, and with
complexity comes cost. The first cost you are likely to encounter is training your administrative staff to design,
deploy and maintain an effective Exchange Server environment. As expensive and
time consuming as the training is, though, it quickly becomes obsolete. |
Messaging Experts.
Cloud-based solutions let you refocus your IT resources on more
strategic initiatives to help grow your business, instead of merely maintaining
the systems required to operate it. Most cloud-based providers employ
experienced and certified staff to maintain their systems. In light of
their service level agreements (SLAs), this is a requirement. |
Ongoing Maintenance |
Regular Patching & Monitoring.
With on-premise solutions, your IT department is responsible for all of the
day-to-day tasks necessary to keep your servers, storage, software, backup
systems and network up-and-running optimally 24–7–365. This includes
security patches, system upgrades and performing regular backups. |
Offload the Headaches.
You can offload the burden and complexity by relying upon a third-party service
provider and their SLAs (usually exceeding 99.9%) to optimize email
uptime. In order to meet their stringent SLAs, cloud-based solution
providers have invested millions of dollars into their architectures, built-in
redundancy and fail-over systems. |
Customer Service |
It’s All YOU.
When your email goes down, your IT department has to scramble to get it up-and-running
ASAP, because it is mission critical. And if you do not have a disaster
recovery or email continuity solution in place, it can often take hours to
troubleshoot. Consequently, IT departments need to provide regular updates to
users while at the same time investigating the root cause of outages. |
One Culprit to Blame.
Since you have effectively shifted your IT burden and headaches to a vendor,
they are on the hook to serve you. Most reputable vendors offer customers
expert support, provided by a dedicated Client Services team, at no additional
cost. So look for vendors that can do everything—including the worrying—for
you. |
Upgrades |
Disruptive and Unpredictable.
Your in-house staff must manage the on-going maintenance of email system to ensure
email is always up and running. With conventional software, it takes
considerable planning and effort to upgrade to newer versions and manage
upgrades. |
Transparent, Continuous Upgrades.
When you turn to a hosted solution, you immediately have a fully equipped,
top-of-the-line system that is continually updated and maintained. This saves
you thousands of dollars in server hardware, software, upgrades and the
expertise to run it all. |
Scalability |
The Costs are Already Invested.
When your company grows, your infrastructure must grow even faster.
Scaling an in-house Exchange environment requires planning and additional
budget (to purchase more servers or software). The problem is worse if
your company is downsizing, since you have already invested in and configured
your system for a specified number of users. |
Easy to Add and Subtract Users.
Since hosting providers have extensive hardware and software resources, they
can scale smoothly and easily. Cloud hosting, in particular, is especially
designed for scalability, since you only use and pay for the infrastructure
resources you need. |
Antivirus & Anti-Spam Protection |
Another Layer of Complexity.
An increasingly important part of administering a messaging environment is
providing a continuously updated advanced spam and virus solution to keep your
email secure. |
Protection Already Built-in.
Most cloud-based email providers offer a basic level of spam and virus
protection (many offer advanced spam and virus protection for an additional
fee), which eliminates 99 percent of unwanted email before it ever reaches your
inbox. A good solution also screens for and quarantines any viruses, which can
bring your email system to a screeching halt. |
Disaster Recovery |
How Long Can You Go without Email?
Research suggests that most small and mid-sized enterprises experience more
than 40 total hours of unplanned email downtime each year. And some estimates
suggest that upwards of 40 percent of these outages last more than 24 hours.
|
Access Your Email Anytime, Anywhere.
Cloud-based providers are usually better equipped to recover from an email outage.
In fact, most cloud-based solutions guarantee their uptime and have built-in
continuity systems to ensure your data does not go down, even if one of their
data centers is impacted by network or hardware malfunctions. |
Administrative Controls |
Technical Expertise Required.
With most on-premise environments, in-depth technical knowledge is required to
setup new users and perform tasks like email routing and managing mailbox
storage limits.
|
Web-based Control.
Cloud-based providers allow you to manage your entire hosted email
environment, including permissions, storage, mailbox creation and more, with
just a few clicks, using an intuitive control panel. |
