How to Improve Your Business Email Infrastructure

It’s no secret that email infrastructure is critical to how your business operates. Most businesses are facing a turning point in managing their own email infrastructure, in that traditional on-premise servers have become too costly and time-consuming to operate.

Email isn’t new technology, but email infrastructure – the way email is accessed, managed and delivered – is always evolving, leading the IT departments of businesses everywhere to consider new, more efficient options.

Before you make massive changes to your business email infrastructure, you should evaluate your business’s specific needs in order to determine the most appropriate solution.

Evaluating your current infrastructure

Evaluating the current system that your business employs is the first step you need to take if you intend on improving the email infrastructure. You should ask yourself the following questions:

· Are your email costs spiraling out of control?

An email system is not static: your business requires it to be constantly accessed, perhaps even by external businesses. Technical pressures can often cause increases in costs involving email archiving, security and emergency recovery. If you find that these costs are constantly on the rise, you may want to start considering an upgrade to a new system.

· Is your current system not scaling well?

It may be the case that your business is suffering from the effects of having an ‘overweight’ email infrastructure. For instance, perhaps a merger or acquisition left a few disparate email systems floating around independently. If this is the case, you need to tie them together so that the overall infrastructure is more efficient.

Possible solutions

If you find that your business email infrastructure suffers from one of the above problems, you may need to invest in a new system. One possible solution is to outsource your email operations to an external hosted provider, replacing your current on-premise infrastructure

A more popular solution is to ‘turn to the sky’ and enlist the services of a cloud email provider, like Mimecast. This offers numerous benefits to the way your business runs its email service. Cloud services for email essentially offload both costs and responsibility in favour of a flexible, universally accessible and efficient system.

With a cloud email service, you will be able to:

· Meet business demands quickly

· Do away with the need for a complex disaster recovery plan

· Enjoy automatic server maintenance, including security updates

· Allow your employees to work from anywhere

· Allow your employees to work on central documents simultaneously

· Decrease your carbon footprint with 30 per cent less energy consumption

Upgrading the business email infrastructure is a junction that all businesses come to at one point or another. The most popular solution these days appears to be cloud email services, as the advantages of flexibility and efficiency seem to reap added profits and other savings. Make sure that you review your business’s individual needs and requirements thoroughly before making a decision.