Why Businesses Are Best Served By Outsourcing Their E-mail Services

By James Driscoll, Lux Scientiae - March 14, 2008

As you are reading this article, over 2.8 billion e-mail messages will be sent today by over 130 million workers in the U. S. alone; globally, the number is closer to 30 billion and rising at an annual rate of about 16% a year. Clearly, e-mail is the core of the enterprise IT infrastructure and whether your enterprise is 20 or 20,000, the same critical questions face you when you consider keeping your e-mail services in house or outsourcing them:

• Which will provide us with the greater efficiency and productivity?
• Which will afford us the best security-now and in the future?
• Measured as a standalone function, which option is most cost-effective?
• Finally, which option will give us the most flexibility going forward?

Email is mission critical; everyone understands the power, reach and value of email today. Underscoring this, a META Group survey of senior IT executives and business managers from over 400 companies found that:

80% of people surveyed said they believe email is more valuable than the phone for business communication.

74% regarded being without email as more of a hardship than being without phone service.

Yet, today, most businesses find themselves with email services that are inherently inefficient and increasingly unproductive. The reasons are ones that you may be familiar with, perhaps some of the very ones that have brought you here today.

You can't be very efficient if you can't produce your product and reliability goes to the heart of the matter. An Osterman Research study found that system uptime was rated the top priority by system respondents; yet, the same survey reported that the average and median downtimes of 229 and 45 minutes, respectively, were deemed "unacceptable". The reasons? Probably ones you know-server crashes, loss of connectivity, denial of service attacks were among those most mentioned.

So, if your business is like most who keep their email service in house—you may have your email, but not and not always the way you want it.

Which brings us to security, or the lack of it. On average, businesses are dedicating 20% of their budgets each year to fight spam, viruses, security breaches and phishing attacks, not to mention increasing regulatory requirements. Yet, they still feel exposed. While most companies look for trouble only from the outside, Datapro Information Services says that in many corporations, secrets are walking out the door. Only 54% of 1300 IT professionals surveyed said their company had any kind of security policy in place. Intellectual property theft is now costing the US about a billion a year and nearly 75% of those thefts occur internally.

Wrap all of these issues around a long-term, hardware-based, in-house service environment and you probably won't have the flexibility you want and need.

So as you analyze these four criteria, it might be good to ask yourself, "how much is it costing me to own each of these benefits and is that cost, relative to the level of benefit being delivered, the best return on my investment?".

Outsourcing your corporate email services to a premium service provider can afford you substantial improvements in these critical categories for many reasons, not the least of which is that one person will only have to wear one hat-liaison to the email service provider, freeing up other people and resources in the enterprise, which could start contributing immediately to greater efficiency, productivity and cost-effectiveness.

The ability to meet ever increasing and shifting security needs is in your control with a premium email provider; choice of options and depth of coverage throughout your business ensures that you can be in front of the curve. Luxsci's Email Defense product is one of the best in the business and it can be deployed in the way that's best for you, not the vendor. Email Defense is just one example of how the right email provider can meet all the criteria that will keep your company firmly - and comfortably - on the right side of the cost/benefit threshold.