Outsource the Headache of Managing an Email Service

• Redundant, carrier-class server infrastructure with no single point of failure and load balancing/failover capabilities
• Redundant or highly available storage for mailboxes
• No downtime migration of customer/employee data
• Email software or appliances with ample data storage
• Integrated and up-to-date spam and virus protection
• Management, monitoring and administration infrastructure
• Technical support infrastructure to handle customer calls/queries
• A specialized abuse team to ensure mail delivery and fight spammers

Implementing this in-house can be expensive, will take significant time, and requires specialized staff. With an outsourced solution, deployment of a private-label email service is quick, as the hardware, software, storage, and administrative infrastructure already exists and you are simply tapping into it.

2 Outsourcing reduces capital expenditures.Implementing an email service in-house will require capital hardware expenditures including:

• Hardware and software licenses for redundant email, anti-spam and anti-virus servers
• Additional web and application servers for web-based email
• Redundant (mirrored or RAID) storage for mailboxes, with sufficient capacity to meet near-term storage requirements

In addition, you will need the necessary data center infrastructure, including network bandwidth, power supply and rack space as well as monitoring/management software.
Outsourcing the email service eliminates these up-front capital expenditures; you pay a service fee based on the number of mailboxes and features when you need. This model is referred to as ‘pay as you grow’, which allows a more efficient use of resources.

3 Your staff stays focused on the core business.
Employees/Subscribers expect email with bundled service packages. However, email may not be one of your core competencies. Running a highly available, competitive email service requires a good deal of dedicated staff time, including;

• Experienced email administrator(s) to set up and maintain the system
• Technical support staff to handle customer questions about email service
• Storage and system administrators to handle the infrastructure
• Ongoing engineering and product development to keep messaging service competitive

The fully-loaded costs of these personnel are significant. Even if you are using existing staff to perform these functions, you will be diverting time from their primary job function of providing the services on which you have built your business.

Media reported the following average or median annual salaries for the following information technology professionals in 2008:

• Database Administrator – $80,700 in US or in India 5,00,000 Rs. per year
• Systems Security Administrator – $70,500 – $99,750 in US or in India 6,00,000 Rs. per year

4 Spam and viruses require constant vigilance.
The email threat landscape is changing regularly. Viruses, directory harvests, denial of service attacks, mail bombs and other forms of spam dominate the list of threats. The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) distributed their October 2007 Email Metrics Report citing over 82% of all message traffic as abusive email. Spammers constantly figure out new techniques to slip by existing spam filters, leveraging armies of “botnets” to swamp mail systems with unwanted offers and scams. And the virus landscape changes regularly as well, requiring constant updates to anti-virus signatures. Our Spamjadoo.com research team continuously work on fighting spam and we have domains which account for 95% of the traffic as spam and gets dropped. 

If you are offering an email service to your organisaiton, you have to address security and abuse issues:

• Spam is costly in terms of bandwidth and storage, while viruses can easily overload and shut down
  your servers.
• Your customers/subscribers/employees will stop using their email accounts if spam is out of control or their
  systems are infected with viruses.

In many cases, users may want to control the sensitivity of the spam filters, or identify specific ‘approved’ senders. Furthermore, spam and virus protection needs frequent upgrades, as attackers and spammers are continuously adjusting their tactics to get around existing defenses. Spam and malware are not problems you solve only once; you need to dedicate resources to the fight on an ongoing basis. Spamjadoo antispam and email privacy solution just fits into that and offers web based control to all spam.

5 A highly-available email infrastructure optimizes uptime.
If you plan to offer or use a high-quality, highly available email service, you need to minimize all downtime, both planned and unplanned. Doing so requires an email infrastructure with redundancy and failover capabilities that protect the service from individual failures, deployed on a fault-tolerant network. The mailbox storage must be redundant. The platform needs full backups of all email data, with offsite storage to protect from a site-wide problem, and the ability to recover data rapidly in the case of failures.

Building such an infrastructure takes both time and expertise. By partnering with a mature email service Provider like us, you have instant access to a highly-available email infrastructure deployed in a data center with physical security and around-the-clock administration. You can examine the vendor’s track record in providing downtime-free service and their service level (SLA) guarantee to get a good idea of the availability you can expect for your service. Experienced email vendors generally guarantee 99.9% availability including planned and unplanned downtime. Providing this kind of service and availability in-house is difficult and time-consuming.

6 You can keep up with market.
Experienced messaging vendors are constantly raising the bar on what consumers expect from email service. It’s no longer enough to offer a basic POP email account. Your people/cusomer want and expect.

• Full-featured web-based email with ample storage
• Instant, ‘push’ email delivery to smart phones and mobile devices
• Complementary services including online storage, secure email and archiving
• Alerts and Reminders through SMS

Likewise, business users expect more of the functionality they have with desktop email applications,including collaboration tools like a calendar and additional full-feature, next generation Ajax capabilities. Your email service must keep pace with changing customer expectations. If you are providing service inhouse, you have to keep investing time and effort into the email infrastructure and upgrades – and rolling out new features without disrupting service or reliability. An outsourced email provider already does this – our core business is software as a service (SaaS) email, so keeping current with changing technologies is part of what we do. We take care of the engineering behind the changes and implementation of new feature roll-outs.

7 Your email costs are known and predictable.
If you choose to outsource email, the cost of email services is known, fixed, and predictable. It is also very affordable when compared with the true cost of providing email service in-house. It can be difficult to determine the actual costs of providing email service in-house. The Total Cost of
Ownership includes:

• Up-front capital expenditures on infrastructure, service and storage
• Ongoing server and storage upgrades to support growing usage/volumes of data
• Ongoing staff costs in server, storage and email administration
• Ongoing staff costs in technical support.

These numbers do not factor in the hidden costs of lost productivity of employees or customers if there are any email service problems. With outsourced email, your true costs are known and fixed.

8 You retain control over the service.
One of the essential reasons for doing email in-house is that you want to retain control over provisioning, billing, etc. But today’s private-label,re-brandable, outsourced email systems are designed to integrate with your business processes and systems. Web-based management consoles give you immediate control over the service, and monitor all the employees activities as and when you need it.

9 Did we mention compliance?
If you have business customers, you have to consider compliance issues. Industry-specific regulations specify data security, availability, protection and retention requirements that your customers may need to observe. Your email system will need to support these requirements. Here again, having an outsourced email solution means that your messaging provider is investing the resources to do this, not your own internal staff.

10 Improve your customer’s / employee quality of experience
This tenth reason is potentially the most important of them all: by outsourcing, you can provide a differentiated, high-quality email service that enhances the overall quality of email users experience.

Summary
If you plan to offer email services to customers/subscribers, you have the choice of supporting the service in-house or outsourcing it. You may think that you can leverage existing infrastructure and expertise to add email support in-house, and indeed this is a viable option for many companies. But if you want to offer differentiated, full-featured and secure email with high reliability levels, outsourcing is a much more attractive and compelling option. Outsourcing lets you concentrate on your core business and delegate email service delivery to someone else whose expertise is email. This helps you keep current in security, features, and high availability without a continuous investment in time and resources beyond the cost of the email application.
And if you do plan to outsource, be sure that your outsourced email provider has a proven track record and can satisfy the ten reasons described in this paper.

Data Ingenious Global Limited – Your Strongest IT Partner Advantage
Our customizable messaging solutions are built on a highly scalable infrastructure and include advanced services such as IMAP, blackberry push email, collaboration tools, comprehensive Spamjadoo anti-spam and virus protection as well as value-added services such as online storage, registered email and archiving. Managing millions messaging connections per month,

Visit us at www.dil.in and find out how we can help you save money and offer satisfaction to your employees or customers.