Business Email Hosting for Corporate Reputation

GREATER BRAND RECOGNITION WITH

Corporate Email Hosting

W W W . G O 4 H O S T I N G . I N

Contents Introduction Executive Summary Email Hosting: An Overview Who Uses Email Hosting?

Who Provides Email Hosting?

Why Email Hosting Makes Sense for Businesses Reasons to Make the Switch to Email Hosting Benefits of Email Hosting Challenges and Opportunities for All Sized Businesses Delivering Security with Corporate Email Hosting Conclusion

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Introduction In this realm of fast-paced technology, e-mails have played a vital role in narrowing down the geographical boundaries for conglomerates, IT behemoths, and individuals.

Undeniably, the advancement of corporate e-mails has overcome the challenges experienced by conventional communication mediums, making it more innovative and agile. In this regard, more and more enterprises are leveraging the services provided by professional and reliable email hosting vendors to streamline their communication process, curtail complex server management issues, and protect their confidential business data.

This whitepaper attempts to throw light on why businesses of all shapes and sizes are adopting corporate email hosting, compares benefits with the challenges faced by them while switching to this solution, as well as the security implications associated with different mailing platforms.

Executive Summary Corporate e-mail hosting solution has emerged as a niche messaging communication medium, which today influences every corner of the globe. It has turned into a comprehensive utility service that minimizes the impact of major service outages.

In the hosted e-mail service model, a service provider sited at a remote geographical location manages all backend services at a flat monthly based user fee. This ensures stronger information safety and security to an organization’s mission critical information at economical costs.

According to a recent research conducted by a group of analysts at IDC, the demand for hosted security solutions is expected to rise by over 30% on an annual basis. In this context, hosted e-mail security solutions are forecasted to multiply by nearly eight times compared to the traditional software solutions by the end of this decade.

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“A corporate or business e-mail hosting is a web-based hosting solution that provides electronic mail services via IMAP and POP3 protocols. Since the email servers are managed by a service provider, it eliminates the requirement for on-premises email server and IT staff to manage these servers.�

Email hosting services are mainly used by the small and medium size businesses (SMBs) that rely on custom-built email addresses, which match the name of their website domain to benefit from better revenue opportunities while minimizing their total cost of operations. In this way, it allows users to create multiple email types utilizing the same trailing address. Most of the larger enterprises run their own equipment by using software like Postfix or Microsoft Exchange.

Email Hosting: An Overview Email hosting is mainly an internet hosting service. This service ideally manages electronic messages by means of an email server. Premium email solutions are provided by this method at inexpensive prices which is unlike advertisement-supported free email.

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Did You Know?

Corporates send & receive 133 emails/day on an average NourGroup

Who Uses Email Hosting?

Email hosting service caters to the needs of demanding email users and Small and Mid-Size Enterprises(SME). Growing popularity of this service amidst such global organizations is because it enables the creation of custom email addresses for employees; these trailing email address are synced with the official website domain.

Numerous email-types are created in the following format.

User_name@domain_name.com After creation, these email addresses are completely managed by the email hosting provider.

Administrators

of

the

email

hosting

service

can

enforce

certain

authentication schemes as per the business requirements presented by the owner.

This tactic ensures identification and specific domain qualification criteria for every email sender. Contrastingly, large corporates make use of third-party software (e.g.

Microsoft Exchange) on their own equipment to run an internal email hosting service.

Who Provides Email Hosting?

Professional email hosting service providers and web hosting companies provide email hosting services. Investing in email packages from web hosting companies would entitle a business owner to POP3 email only. Such free email hosting packages include basic spam/virus protection and ad-support. But these business email operations are not advisable for corporate use. Rather, professional email hosting services are recommended for an SME because these are reliable and secured.

A professional email hosting provider makes business email hosting simple. The mailing platform gets centrally managed on a day-to-day basis. Such providers also have premium email solution packages hosted on an advanced as well as dedicated email platform, which are customized as per business critical needs. Providers also render a rich set of email support features such as:

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•

Auto responders

•

Mail rule

•

Backups

•

Unlimited aliases

•

White lists

•

Contacts management

•

IMAP/POP3

•

Blacklists

•

Archiving

•

Unlimited forwarders

•

Online storage

•

Folder management

•

Robust spam/virus protection

•

Calendars

•

Large attachment

•

Mailing lists

Email Server

Email Blackberry

Administrator Traveling

Global Message Archiver

Internet

Online News Internet Fax

Employee

Firewall Home

Scanned Images Instant message Bloomberg Mail

Manager Email Attachements

By making use of such a hosting service, users can access their email on an email-client of their choice from any internet enabled device (e.g. smart phone, blackberry, laptop, netbook, tablet etc.). Technology inclusions may vary across different email hosting providers, but the ultimate goal is to keep business email secure and back up the entire service with an industry leading SLA. Despite the availability of countless free email services, a business branded email is indispensable. Obtaining such a service through ISP email address (e.g. Gmail) is near to impossible. So every business house, regardless of its size,ought to communicate through an exclusive and proprietary email domain name. This requirement gets fulfilled only when the business house signs up for a robust email hosting service from a professional vendor.

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Why Email Hosting Makes Sense for Businesses No doubt, email hosting sets the stage for initiating communication that can continue effectively without the complexity of email management. This email solution is integrated with Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook that allow you to communicate more effectively while keeping your organized emails and files safe. Today, the lion’s share of organizations are adopting email hosting solution as it has evolved into a staple communication process featuring sheer speed and cost effectiveness. In fact, email hosting has now entered the main stream of business strategies with adopters comprise of SMBs and large enterprises expect to obtain benefit from affordability, data loss prevention, collaboration, spam, virus and content filtering and above all business scalability.

Radicati Group, a leading technology market research firm in one of its studies unfolds that worldwide installed base of email hosting has increased rapidly due to the amalgamation of high-end features like enterprise-grade messaging and collaboration, anti-virus and spam-filtering protection, support for wireless email and affordability.

With this email solution, businesses without regard to size are capable of scaling their goals with email archiving enables them to minimize the need for storage space by slashing the volume of emails in mailboxes and moving them to static environments. In fact, the implementation of email hosting frees the IT departments from the hassles of managing email platforms internally, resulting in reducing the costs of organizations without affecting their productivity.

Reasons to Make the Switch to Email Hosting Since email is the primary source of communication within and outside the company, a robust email hosting solution helps businesses to improve productivity by allowing them easily access their emails, calendars, contacts, task management tools and so on. In fact, email hosting works in compliance with business requirements, urging organizations to adopt it. However, this whitepaper highlights some reasons that favour organizations to switch to email hosting including:

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Maximum Protection It is note worthy to mention that service providers of email hosting ensure to provide guaranteed uptime and integrated disaster recovery solutions through tools such as IMAP and POP. These tools ensure to protect your data from a myriad of risks and prevent unauthorized access to your mail. This means that data tempering or theft doesn’t not exist in this email solution.

Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam Filtering Solution For those who don’t know, email hosting comes with an anti-virus and anti-spam service that filters all incoming and outgoing mails of corporations in order for detecting viruses. Once detected, all unwanted files and messages are sent to the online quarantine folder to keep your business computers free from troubles. In fact, this email solution de-clutters your commercial inbox in compliance with your business requirements.

Increased Efficiency Adopting this email solution guarantees to optimize the performance of your business as you are able to communicate flawlessly with your employees, partners and customers from anytime, anywhere. Also, you can choose different email platforms to send and receive emails and all this comes under your domain name.

Huge Mailbox Capacity With email hosting, the storage space you get on per mailbox is adequate to efficiently run your business without increasing the cost of operation. In fact, you can benefit from economies of scale by allowing you to pay for the space you use. At the same time, you can store tens of thousands of emails without being feared of data loss.

Email @ Your Domain Name Obtaining brand recognition becomes easier with an email hosting plan as you can email to others or your customers can email you using your domain name, which is indeed your company’s name.

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Benefits of Email Hosting E-mail hosting continues to grow among businesses. It has become one of the essential requirements for every business whether it is an Enterprise or a SME. It provides businesses the ability to have great email services without spending additional costs. An e-mail hosting solution ensures better organizational goals and stable communication process. It adds credible profile to a business or an e-mail address that would carry the domain name.

Along with numerous benefits, e-mail hosting also provides feature rich exchange environment and various mailing functionalities. A hosted e-mail solution ensures complete support against all the difficulties which are associated with server maintenance.

Chat

Mobile Access

Mailbox Size

Right MX

Powerful Admin

Anti Spam

Collaboration

Antivirus Secure File Transfer Mailbox Migration

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Sharing

Top 5 Benefits of E-mail Hosting Include Data Security One of the most important benefits of e-mail hosting is the security of stored data.

Businesses avail complete data encryption and no unauthorized party can access of it.

E-mail hosting providers generally equip their servers with industry encryption that means that your data will be completely transitioned and saved for future use.

Adequate Storage Businesses can avail adequate data storage space with e-mail hosting solutions.

E-mail hosting organizations provide enough storage space to store all confidential business data and thousands of critical messages. Enterprises and SMEs opt for flexible e-mail hosting plans which allow them to customize their storage limits.

Businesses can increase and decrease the storage space easily as per their requirements.

Spam Mail Filtration E-mail hosting provides spam filtering features which help sorting out unwanted spam mails. These features separate unwanted emails and allow the important business to enter inbox. Businesses can check important mails listed in inbox and not waste time on sorting the spams. Spam mail filtering feature saves business productive time.

Communication for Professionals Business emails make business communication more professional and transparent.

Organizations can use e-mails for internal and external communication. Enterprises can communicate internally with all the employees. They can also communicate externally with customers and stakeholders. Businesses can send business proposal to the prospective customer through business e-mail account and it creates an impact. Business e-mails look more professional and convincing than free web mails.

Advanced Features E-mail hosting comes with numbers of advanced features which web mails don’t provide. It has numerous added features than just a free e-mail service. There features are;

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• • • •

Customization of the size of the mail box size according requirements Businesses avail features like mail grouping and mail monitoring Enterprises can avail the feature like sharing contacts, calendars and task with backup and recovery of deleted mails.

Organizations can even customize their business email service as per business requirements and according to their e-mail hosting plans.

Challenges and Opportunities for All Sized Businesses In this digitally-driven economic environment, email has become an integral and foremost channel of the business workflow. Businesses of all delineations in the corporate ecosphere are leveraging this fastest mode of communication for carrying business correspondence including sales transactions, purchase orders, and quotations.

Here, are a few challenges faced by businesses of all contours when deciding to host and manage their mailing servers in-house: Upfront Cost Hosting on-premise comes with enormous overhead cost, including: •

Hardware: Depending on the business demands, an emailing platform could

feature one server or ask for extended hardware deployment. Numbers of hardware equipment installation rise with the outgrowth of emailing transactions, and storage capacity.

•

Maintenance: IT technicians are needed all the time to maintain mail server, fix

technical glitches to ensure that communication channel is running faultlessly. In this light, conducting astute recruitment process to hire knowledgeable technicians becomes an inevitable need for businesses, which apparently is a time-consuming process.

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•

Licensing: On-site email hosting involves licensing fees. Purchasing one license

per user can become too expensive for companies. Additionally, they need to deal with the complexity of annual renewals, keeping a check on approaching license expiration date.

•

Consulting: For hassle-free communication platform, organizations need to

approach experienced consultants on a regular interval of time to fix, install and upgrade systems.

Infrastructure Email servers are required to be positioned in an environmentally balanced and secured place, with adequate power and cooling supply. The cost associated with power/cooling/security gets increased with each new server added.

•

Bandwidth: The emailing server shares the bandwidth with every connected

device in the office premises. When the server gets bombarded with heavy traffic flow, the speed automatically gets slowed down, entailing delayed sending/receiving of emails.

•

Connectivity: In order to ensure that emailing server remains up and running all

the time, businesses need to connect or house multiple ISP providers that ensure fastest internet connectivity.

•

Redundancy: Protecting email servers against power outages including network

failures, and hardware glitches, companies need to have redundant power backups, multiple ISP providers, and spare hardware equipment to dispel every cause of unpredictable disaster.

Security Vigorous security layers needed to be implemented that help safeguarding an organization’s confidential data and aid in the enforcement of proper email use.

•

Physical Security: To create a protected endpoint, organizations are compelled

to have robust security provisions in place to avert email leakage, asset theft and email loss. This is accomplished by biometric access, video surveillance, employee access point using multi-layered authentication, tracking and monitoring tools.

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•

Information Security: Defending organization’s confidential data from email-borne

malware and spam to deliver clean, and promote secure and productive email use is undeniably critical to business continuity. This is accomplished by implementing anti-spamming and anti-virus scanning engines. Moreover, attachments carrying unidentified threats are required to be stopped at the Internet level before reaching to the user’s mailboxes.

Email Archiving There is a host of reasons for an enterprise to archive its email including compliance, storage, litigation and knowledge management. Stringent control and penalties have mounted pressure on companies to adhere to regulatory compliance more seriously.

Indeed, data and regulatory statutes differ by industries, however all records pertaining to business activity are subject to compliance regulations. Right from healthcare industry to banking sectors, IT behemoths and government organizations archive their emails.

“Bank of America (BoA) was charged $10 million for failing to submit the information requested by SEC and also for not retaining email records in a stipulated time frame.”

Send E-mail User B

User A

Journal E-mail

Disk Groups

Journal Mailbox

Archive E-mail

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E-mail Archive Services

Database

Archiving emails in-house involves email repository within the corporate building. The company must purchase superior email archiving program as well as the hardware equipment which will host the archive.

Also, archived emails should appropriately index to enable fast extraction of records to support legal discovery, and regulatory audit requests.

Scalability Keeping a pace with the fastest evolving corporate world is essential for business existence. Deploying extra hardware equipment, purchasing overpowered servers and expensive licenses to cater to the futuristic requirement becomes essential for in-house email server management and maintenance.

Quick Glance at Email Hosting Aspects Experienced email administrators set-up, installs and manages the system Technical Support staff is available around the clock to handle technical emergencies Sensitive emails are encrypted before they leave user’s mailbox Antivirus and Antispyware protection

Now, let’s throw a light on the various opportunities that come with hosted email services Lower Costs Many entrepreneurs believe that managing email server on-premises is less expensive than opting for hosted email. However, a research conducted by Osterman reveals than an onsite 100 seat Exchange deployment costs approximately $49 over a three year system lifetime, whereas a 1,000-seat Exchange deployment costs $21 per seat per month, which brilliantly proves the direct cost-savings from hosted email services.

Additionally, email hosting service providers include the licensing costs as part of their service.

Predictable Costs Hosted email services provide more predictable costs and scalability than onsite deployments. An organization that adds new users with every passing day, reaches to a limit, demanding more servers and other critical components to anticipate incoming user requests. Hosted email solutions eliminate the hardware, software licensing, storage and infrastructure expenses.

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Data Backup With hosted email solutions, the provider proficiently manages the entire backend infrastructure, including regular/weekly/monthly backups. This mitigates service outages and protects emails against disastrous events. A hurricane, tornado, fire, flood can wipe out messaging capabilities in no time, for hours and even for days.

Whereas, hosted email service providers are well-prepared to defy these challenges.

Regular backups and network redundancy maintained by the service provider ensures uninterrupted communication flow.

Easy Administration Offsite email hosting providers eliminates almost all the hassles of on-premises email archives, data backups, setup and installations. An email host swiftly performs all the routine server management and monitoring tasks including upgrades, and enhancements.

Email Policy Management Most of the leading providers incorporate functions to identify and manage sensitive, malicious email content and images sent/received, which help in reducing email loss and augments organization’s email ‘acceptable use guidelines’. The add-on service is included to detect unethical content by analyzing various components including email body, headers, and subject line.

• • • •

Email attachments are tracked and scanned for phrases, keywords, URL list, as determined by the administration.

Block threats across email, before they enters organizations network Multi-layered protection layer is deployed to safeguard emails against vulnerabilities Prevent emails mishandling and enforce Acceptable Use Guidelines

Scalability Onsite email hosting providers provide huge mailbox capacity as per the business demand. Businesses need to pay some subscription fee rather than paying fixed amount for unnecessary overpowered servers, and infrastructure components.

Email Archiving Email archiving allows organizations to setup access restrictions in order to safeguard its intellectual property rights and ascertain data integrity and privacy in compliance to the statutes.

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Anti-virus and Anti-spam filters Hosted email solutions free organization’s IT team to focus on core competencies rather than performing mundane management tasks. Robust antivirus and anti-spamming programs are installed by skilled technicians at service provider’s end.

Hosted services provide a smarter way of outsourcing hardware, software and the management solutions to cater to the in-house business demands.

Delivering Security with Corporate Email Hosting With the rising availability and adoption of the Internet, email is quickly replacing both telephone and fax machines as the principal form of day-to-day business communication. A study conducted by the Osterman Research illustrates that organizations using hosted Exchange services in various forms will grow by nearly 11% across the globe. This can be further depicted in the graph given below: 12%

11.4%

10% 8%

8.0% 6% 4%

5.2%

2% 0%

2012

2013

2014

Evidently, a growing number of businesses are deploying email hosting models to effectively manage and maintain overhead costs, while securing their critical e-mails against any disaster or power outages. It further facilitates organizations to:

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• • • •

Archive their entire inbound email communication Access emails even if the server goes offline or crashes Restore involuntarily deleted emails Integrated security against virus and other nasty malwares

In this light, ensuring email security plays a pivotal role in filtering-out spams and other unsolicited information. This means, viruses are isolated and intercepted before delivering messages to the users, ensuring that data and mail server are not affected by malware in the transit. Besides, deploying software solutions, organizations can ascertain email security in following ways: Email Encryption Securing business communication by authenticating email messages is often used by enterprises to protect the privacy of their critical content. Based on the rising volumes of sensitive and confidential information traversing across company’s network on a daily basis, various regulations like HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, and PCI have been introduced by the business executives and regulatory bodies to mandate that corporate messages with sensitive messages are handled securely.

Hence, email encryption is considered as an important aspect of managing overall email security of the confidential information. It allows a free flow of communication between a business and its employees, customers, and partners.

Private Area

Did You Know?

Public Area Secure Email Received

1

We spend 41% of our valuable time in managing e-mails.

Partner supports encryption

2 Your Secure Email Gateway

Sentinel Platform

Partner does not support encryption

Email Notice

+

Secure Web Link

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Did You Know?

Secure Email Received

NourGroup

Cloud Email Security As enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud technology and are moving their business mailboxes to the cloud, third party service providers are deploying solutions to protect their confidential messages against any online threats. The cloud-based email security approach works between the mail server of the vendor and the Internet.

This ensures that the content is free from virus and verifies the standard policy guidelines are met before it is sent to the user. This delivers a host of benefits to organizations, including: • • • • •

Scanning viruses for inbound and outbound messages passes through the cloud Filtering spams and blacklisting content with intercepted malwares Maintaining centralized content with regular system updates Implementing web-based consoles for easy configuration of security settings Monitoring email traffic on a regular basis to avoid points of failover

In addition, there are acquisition and operational benefits of following cloud approach, which eliminates physical hardware costs, site maintenance costs, and expenditure for acquiring software licenses.

Customized Threat Filtering As data breach is on the rise, technology pundits anticipate that organizations across the globe will invest in multi-layered filtering mechanisms. From start-ups to big size enterprises, security threats have underscored the universal ecosystem. To this end, applying a holistic approach that combines both automated and advanced analytics can continuously monitor and analyze blends of information to make a threat assessment. For this purpose, most of the service providers apply scanning technology to identify and filter inbound & outbound spams, without blocking the legitimate emails. The customizable mail scanning technologies use integrated threat intelligence to continuously track malicious IP addresses and block potential threats from identified targets, along with rising threats from zombies and botnets. The antivirus and antispam engines are powered by the integrated security tools for preventing spamming, phishing, spyware, viruses, and various other malware.

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Conclusion Corporate e-mail hosting service is a smarter way of outsourcing hardware, software and managing day-to-day communication to cater to various in-house business demands. It provides credible profile to organizations to set-up its goals and encourages enterprises, irrespective of size and nature of business, to avail email hosting plans for keeping their emails and files safe. Exclusive and proprietary email domain names deliver a competitive edge to organizations, which stands testimony to the fact that, professional email hosting service eliminates the need for setting up IT teams and inhouse email servers. Likewise, email domain names are secured, customizable, and affordable solution that meets various business communication requirements of all the organizations.

Go4Hosting.in is a leading provider of cogent email hosting solutions at affordable prices. Our customized hosting plans are designed to help businesses in keeping their emails safe, while enabling them to achieve economies of scale and reducing their cost of operations.

For more information, please visit our website www.go4hosting.in

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