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Contents 
Introduction
The pros and cons
Evading the spamsters
A final note of caution |
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Before looking into outsourcing e-mail, it's important to be aware of both the benefits and the drawbacks of migrating to an outsourced model.
Organisations that have rejected the outsourcing model tend to cite questions of cost and data security as reasons enough to keep e-mail in-house.
The security, privacy, and integrity of an organisations' data is a major cause for concern -- many IT managers and business executives would shudder at the prospect of handing over such vital data to an offsite entity.
These are legitimate concerns -- the reality is that e-mail messages are stored, analysed, and then forwarded -- providing several opportunities for a breach of security.
| "We can take six to nine servers and replace them with just one box." -- Mike Bosch, Ironport Systems |
Also on the plus side, outsourcing the management of e-mail may actually result in reducing costs. Service providers cite the expenses involved in evaluating, purchasing, and managing security and anti-spam software.
They also cite the need to invest in infrastructure for archiving and storing e-mail in-house. Outsourcing these tasks can potentially lead to a reduction in infrastructure costs -- as unnecessary messages are no longer stored.
More importantly, management overheads and system downtime costs can be eliminated -- leaving the IT department to focus on strategic areas rather than spending time putting out fires.
"Companies do not need to invest in expensive hardware and software such as servers, high-end e-mail programs, licensing, and upgrades to licenses for software and security, network, server, and application administrators, certification, 24x7 internal staff, and so on," says IDC analyst Aprajita Sharman.
"E-mail outsourcing can offer economies of scale that would be difficult for organisations to get on their own. Companies are realising the importance of e-mail management as a managed service and vendors have succeeded in overcoming many of the barriers [that come with this]. It is important for organisations however to choose vendors who have security, ISO certifications and compliance," adds Sharman.
The cost of services provided vary depending on what features you need (spam-filtering, antivirus, and so on), and the number of e-mail boxes required. MailGuard, for example, charges a set-up fee of AU$199, and AU$1650 for up to 25 users -- costing a small business a total of AU$1849 for the first year.
The journalism in this article is pathetic.
Just a monkey cut and pasting facts and references with very little analysis.
ZDNET needs to pay more obviously.