Is it time to switch to hosted email?

Email is an indispensable business tool, but that doesn’t mean your office needs its own email server. Hosted email can provide a reliable and cost-effective alternative, whether your business is a tiny start-up or a thousand-seat business. Microsoft’s Office 365 is the most popular service available, although there are alternatives, such as Google Apps for Work.

The advantage of hosted email

If you already have a working email system, you may not see an urgent need to make a change. But email isn’t a service where you want to wait until something goes wrong to take action.

“It’s easy to set up an Exchange server,” Craig Cotter, brand director at Heart Internet told us. “And it’s simple to just leave it running. But one day your Exchange server stops working, and if you don’t have redundancy, your email is gone. Even if you do have redundancy, you might end up with an Active Directory problem. These are issues that require a full-time Windows system administrator or Exchange expert to fix.”

It’s a problem of which IT professionals are well aware. Joseph Woodhouse, an IT manager at Redgate – a development house making software for IT professionals who work with SQL Server, .NET and Oracle – explained that his business had chosen to make the switch in order to free up that staffing requirement.

“We have a small IT team,” he explained. “With hosted email we don’t have to manage and maintain the infrastructure, so that’s one less thing to worry about. It frees up our system administrators to work on more valuable things that they can contribute to the business.”

This doesn’t mean that switching to hosted email benefits only the IT department. On the contrary, the biggest advantage can be to small companies that lack such an in-house function. “Small companies in particular tend not to have a full-time Exchange expert,” noted Cotter. “So when something does go wrong, they have to hire someone for a few hundred pounds per hour, on a per-incident basis. By the time the issue is fixed, they’ll have spent more than their yearly IT budget for email.”

Mark Gardner, IT consultant at the Ffestiniog Railway Company, explained that the Welsh heritage railway had chosen hosted email specifically to avoid that scenario.

“Ours is a very small business,” he explained. “Our business isn’t IT, and we have limited IT resources. Until recently, we were running on a failing Exchange 2003 installation, so we needed to move to something more stable. Switching to Office 365 hosted email let us do that, and at the same time enabled us to reduce the impact on our resources.”

Gardner’s mention of Exchange 2003 brings up another benefit of subscription services: you no longer need to worry about keeping software up to date. “Upgrades are challenging, so in many cases organisations simply don’t upgrade,” said Cotter. “And so sooner or later, these pieces of software reach end-of-life. In July, we have Windows Server 2003 hitting end-of-life, and a lot of organisations will still be running that.” From a business standpoint that’s an unacceptable security risk.

Making the switch

You might expect that migrating a service as fundamental as email will be a major project. In practice, it can be surprisingly straightforward.

“We experienced very little upheaval,” said Gardner. “The hosted email is a completely different, completely parallel service, so there’s no problem there. The only issue was that we changed our domain name at the time – that was the biggest bit of aggravation we faced. That was our own fault, however.”

Meanwhile, Redgate chose a staged migration to ensure a smooth transition. “We created a group nicknamed ‘trailblazers’,” Woodhouse told us. “That was about 30 people or so, from all over the business. We migrated them first and collected ould based on their experience, then started scheduling small groups of people to migrate.”

In fact, the few hitches the company did hit were chiefly to do with administration. “There were definitely some challenges in terms of understanding the renewed licensing model,” said Woodhouse. “It isn’t a straightforward transition from licence to subscription.” A few housekeeping issues cropped up too: “We had to rewrite some of our scripts to handle things that had been automated previously, such as when someone starts or leaves the company,” revealed senior system administrator Jonathan Masefield. “But it isn’t a major job.”

“There’s a bit more latency than with something hosted on-premise too,” added Woodhouse. “It’s not a huge difference, but staff such as PAs and receptionists – who rely heavily on calendaring – notice it.”

Another difference to be aware of is the constantly refreshing nature of cloud services. “The portal does change from time to time,” said Gardner. “There have been one or two surprises, and with a user base that isn’t always terribly computer literate, that kind of simple change is difficult to handle – particularly when it comes as a surprise, as has been the case with each update so far.”

Risks and caveats

When entrusting a business-critical service to a third party, questions of support and reliability will inevitably loom large. “Do your research beforehand,” warned Cotter. “Don’t go with a fly-by-night vendor.”

Those that have made the switch, however, have no regrets. “Office 365 has a ‘three-nines’ service- level agreement,” said Woodhouse. “And we’ve invested in a failover service through Mimecast, so if we were to lose the Microsoft platform for any period of time, we could carry on sending and receiving emails through a different service.”

It’s also worth considering the legalities of letting a third party handle your email. “Some businesses may be concerned about having confidential email handled by a hosted service,” noted Woodhouse. “They might need to take into consideration the location of the data.” Gardner agrees: “At the end of the day, we’re not happy with the idea of data being outside of the country,” he told us. “But the benefits outweigh everything else in that respect for us.”

One concern that can be allayed is the fear of losing your archives if your service is discontinued for any reason. “If you’re using Exchange, you can have local backups of your mailbox,” explained Cotter. “Even when you’re using a hosted solution, those can be uploaded to another Exchange system. So if, for whatever reason, a provider does go for the nuclear option then, provided you’ve kept a local backup, things are never completely out of your hands.”

Is it time to switch?

So, is it time for your business to move away from local email? All of our experts agreed: unless there’s something exceptional about your organisation, the answer is almost certainly yes. “If I were to start a business now, I’d probably go with Google Apps or hosted Exchange right from the start,” commented Cotter. “It’s much lower risk, for a much lower initial outlay, and it gives me freedom to move easily.”

Woodhouse agreed: “If I were starting from scratch, building an IT service or business, this is where I’d start. The cloud is exactly where email and calendaring should be. I see no advantage to running it locally.”

“I can’t see the point in maintaining your own local email system, irrespective of the size of your business,” echoed Mark Gardner. “The benefits are probably greater for a smaller business than a larger one, but now that we’ve migrated, we get simplicity and reliability – and we no longer need to employ that skilled resource. It’s been a good news story for us all round.”

The Expert View from Steve Cassidy

It’s clear that moving services into the cloud can work wonders for a business. If you fit into the expectations of the marketplace then migrating is a slick, smooth process providing plenty of benefits.

It helps to be a history-free start-up, though. If you have lots of baggage, or lots of internal procedures built on structures that are out of favour, then moving can be a bigger deal. That’s why the big brands are no longer pushing an all-cloud mindset. Both Microsoft and VMware have recently stopped talking about pure off-premise cloud resources, and are talking about “hybrid” cloud instead.

If you haven’t encountered it, this is a rather loose term for a system that ties together your old on-site kit with your new off-site cloud portfolio. If you’re not sure whether you need to think about a hybrid solution, a good place to start is to determine how much email you need to store. Ignore the advertised upper limits for online cloud-based email storage: providers will happily quote the sky as the limit, without addressing the question of how long it might take to actually upload all your data. One client of mine paid handsomely for one of the leading cloud services. Then they started trying to work out how long it would take their 23TB email archive to transfer at a rate of about six messages a minute. One wag estimated the completion time at around 30,000 years.

In fact, I’d say the breakpoint appears to be about 10GB. While this might sound a lot, if you’ve been in business for some time, you may have got there without trying very hard at all. On my own, I’m on about 6GB, going back as far as the year 2000. Once you reach that sort of level, hybrid starts to look pretty attractive, especially when you factor in the huge collapse in hardware costs since the days when Exchange 2003 ruled the roost.

It’s also a good idea not to bet everything on an unscrupulous hosting provider that might be keen to get you into a position from which it’s difficult to leave. Look at the skills market nowadays – the demand isn’t for old-school Exchange administrators; it’s for digital presence administrators, schooled in the technical and contractual aspects of moving away from a flaky or difficult provider. I’ve had clients that have tried, and left, three different hosted-email companies.

To be clear, now that the hosting business has settled into an observable, understandable pattern with known strengths and weaknesses, my advice is certainly to embrace hosted email. Just don’t keep it as your only option. Invest in another domain, or set up some more complicated split between on-premise and off-premise services. Don’t let the cloud be your only basket for increasingly important emails.