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1 Outsourcing delivers a quick, on demand working
deployment.
Outsourcing delivers a benefit from the onset of service by
accelerating the deployment phase. If you plan to implement
an email service in-house, you will need to install,
configure and test a complete infrastructure to deploy the
email service. To provide high service levels, this
infrastructure must include:
-
Redundant,
carrier-class server infrastructure with no single point
of failure and load balancing/failover capabilities
-
Redundant
or highly available storage for mailboxes
-
No downtime
migration of customer/employee data
-
Email
software or appliances with ample data storage
-
Integrated
and up-to-date spam and virus protection
-
Management,
monitoring and administration infrastructure
-
Technical
support infrastructure to handle customer calls/queries
-
A
specialized abuse team to ensure mail delivery and fight
spammers
Implementing
this in-house can be expensive, will take significant time,
and requires specialized staff. With an outsourced solution,
deployment of a private-label email service is quick, as the
hardware, software, storage, and administrative
infrastructure already exists and you are simply tapping
into it.
2 Outsourcing reduces capital expenditures.Implementing an
email service in-house will require capital hardware
expenditures including:
-
Hardware and
software licenses for redundant email, anti-spam and
anti-virus servers
-
Additional
web and application servers for web-based email
-
Redundant
(mirrored or RAID) storage for mailboxes, with
sufficient capacity to meet near-term storage
requirements
In addition, you
will need the necessary data center infrastructure,
including network bandwidth, power supply and rack space as
well as monitoring/management software.
Outsourcing the email service eliminates these up-front
capital expenditures; you pay a service fee based on the
number of mailboxes and features when you need. This model
is referred to as ‘pay as you grow’, which allows a more
efficient use of resources.
3 Your staff stays focused on the core business.
Employees/Subscribers expect email with bundled service
packages. However, email may not be one of your core
competencies. Running a highly available, competitive email
service requires a good deal of dedicated staff time,
including;
-
Experienced
email administrator(s) to set up and maintain the system
-
Technical
support staff to handle customer questions about email
service
-
Storage and
system administrators to handle the infrastructure
-
Ongoing
engineering and product development to keep messaging
service competitive
The fully-loaded
costs of these personnel are significant. Even if you are
using existing staff to perform these functions, you will be
diverting time from their primary job function of providing
the services on which you have built your business.
Media reported the following average or median annual
salaries for the following information technology
professionals in 2008:
-
Database
Administrator - $80,700 in US or in India 5,00,000 Rs.
per year
-
Systems
Security Administrator - $70,500 - $99,750 in US or in
India 6,00,000 Rs. per year
4 Spam and
viruses require constant vigilance.
The email threat landscape is changing regularly. Viruses,
directory harvests, denial of service attacks, mail bombs
and other forms of spam dominate the list of threats. The
Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) distributed their
October 2007 Email Metrics Report citing over 82% of all
message traffic as abusive email. Spammers constantly figure
out new techniques to slip by existing spam filters,
leveraging armies of “botnets” to swamp mail systems with
unwanted offers and scams. And the virus landscape changes
regularly as well, requiring constant updates to anti-virus
signatures. Our Spamjadoo.com research team continuously
work on fighting spam and we have domains which account for
95% of the traffic as spam and gets dropped.
If you are offering an email service to your organisaiton,
you have to address security and abuse issues:
-
Spam is
costly in terms of bandwidth and storage, while viruses
can easily overload and shut down
your servers.
-
Your
customers/subscribers/employees will stop using their
email accounts if spam is out of control or their
systems are infected with viruses.
In many cases,
users may want to control the sensitivity of the spam
filters, or identify specific ‘approved’ senders.
Furthermore, spam and virus protection needs frequent
upgrades, as attackers and spammers are continuously
adjusting their tactics to get around existing defenses.
Spam and malware are not problems you solve only once; you
need to dedicate resources to the fight on an ongoing basis.
Spamjadoo antispam and email privacy solution just fits into
that and offers web based control to all spam.
5 A highly-available email infrastructure optimizes
uptime.
If you plan to offer or use a high-quality, highly
available email service, you need to minimize all downtime,
both planned and unplanned. Doing so requires an email
infrastructure with redundancy and failover capabilities
that protect the service from individual failures, deployed
on a fault-tolerant network. The mailbox storage must be
redundant. The platform needs full backups of all email
data, with offsite storage to protect from a site-wide
problem, and the ability to recover data rapidly in the case
of failures.
Building such an infrastructure takes both time and
expertise. By partnering with a mature email service
Provider like us, you have instant access to a
highly-available email infrastructure deployed in a data
center with physical security and around-the-clock
administration. You can examine the vendor’s track record in
providing downtime-free service and their service level (SLA)
guarantee to get a good idea of the availability you can
expect for your service. Experienced email vendors generally
guarantee 99.9% availability including planned and unplanned
downtime. Providing this kind of service and availability
in-house is difficult and time-consuming.
6 You can keep up with market.
Experienced messaging vendors are constantly raising the bar
on what consumers expect from email service. It’s no longer
enough to offer a basic POP email account. Your people/cusomer
want and expect.
-
Full-featured web-based email with ample storage
-
Instant,
‘push’ email delivery to smart phones and mobile devices
-
Complementary services including online storage, secure
email and archiving
-
Alerts and
Reminders through SMS
Likewise,
business users expect more of the functionality they have
with desktop email applications,including collaboration
tools like a calendar and additional full-feature, next
generation Ajax capabilities. Your email service must keep
pace with changing customer expectations. If you are
providing service inhouse, you have to keep investing time
and effort into the email infrastructure and upgrades – and
rolling out new features without disrupting service or
reliability. An outsourced email provider already does this
– our core business is software as a service (SaaS) email,
so keeping current with changing technologies is part of
what we do. We take care of the engineering behind the
changes and implementation of new feature roll-outs.
7 Your email costs are known and predictable.
If you choose to outsource email, the cost of email services
is known, fixed, and predictable. It is also very affordable
when compared with the true cost of providing email service
in-house. It can be difficult to determine the actual costs
of providing email service in-house. The Total Cost of
Ownership includes:
-
Up-front
capital expenditures on infrastructure, service and
storage
-
Ongoing
server and storage upgrades to support growing
usage/volumes of data
-
Ongoing
staff costs in server, storage and email administration
-
Ongoing
staff costs in technical support.
These numbers do
not factor in the hidden costs of lost productivity of
employees or customers if there are any email service
problems. With outsourced email, your true costs are known
and fixed.
8 You retain control over the service.
One of the essential reasons for doing email in-house is
that you want to retain control over provisioning, billing,
etc. But today’s private-label,re-brandable, outsourced
email systems are designed to integrate with your business
processes and systems. Web-based management consoles give
you immediate control over the service, and monitor all the
employees activities as and when you need it.
9 Did we mention compliance?
If you have business customers, you have to consider
compliance issues. Industry-specific regulations specify
data security, availability, protection and retention
requirements that your customers may need to observe. Your
email system will need to support these requirements. Here
again, having an outsourced email solution means that your
messaging provider is investing the resources to do this,
not your own internal staff.
10 Improve your customer’s / employee quality of
experience
This tenth reason is potentially the most
important of them all: by outsourcing, you can provide a
differentiated, high-quality email service that enhances the
overall quality of email users experience.
Summary
If you plan to offer email services to
customers/subscribers, you have the choice of supporting the
service in-house or outsourcing it. You may think that you
can leverage existing infrastructure and expertise to add
email support in-house, and indeed this is a viable option
for many companies. But if you want to offer differentiated,
full-featured and secure email with high reliability levels,
outsourcing is a much more attractive and compelling option.
Outsourcing lets you concentrate on your core business and
delegate email service delivery to someone else whose
expertise is email. This helps you keep current in security,
features, and high availability without a continuous
investment in time and resources beyond the cost of the
email application.
And if you do plan to outsource, be sure that your
outsourced email provider has a proven track record and can
satisfy the ten reasons described in this paper.
Data Infosys – Your Strongest IT Partner Advantage
Our customizable messaging solutions are built on a highly
scalable infrastructure and include advanced services such
as IMAP, blackberry push email, collaboration tools,
comprehensive Spamjadoo anti-spam and virus protection as
well as value-added services such as online storage,
registered email and archiving. Managing millions messaging
connections per month,
Visit us at
www.datainfosys.net
and find out how we can help you save money and offer
satisfaction to your employees or customers.
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