Outsourcing business functions is fast becoming a defining characteristic of modern commerce. The benefits of having third party companies carry the payroll, HR and logistics burdens for services that were traditionally supplied in-house are considerable and off site service provision is here to stay. Companies have also started to look to outsourcing their IT requirements with implementation of off-site server functions such as Cloud and hosted Exchange services.

Mail Exchange has revolutionised the way companies structure their email services with the power of always-synced email, files, contacts and calendars, sophisticated meeting planners and centralised address lists and user groups.

Exchange services are without a doubt extremely powerful business tools but do tend to be pricy, set up costs alone can exceed $10,000. This cost coupled with the need to maintain and man servers in-house often places exchange services out of the reach of smaller businesses.

This is where hosted Exchange services come into their own. Having Exchange services run off-site makes a lot of sense for SMBs (small to midsize business). The service runs from a professionally administered, remote server and the company gets to have access to the benefits of Exchange without having to shoulder the associated costs.

Running a hosted Exchange service holds several noteworthy benefits. Firstly, the costs are minimal with only a small monthly fee charged by the host company. High roll out costs are avoided as are the costs of maintaining on-site servers and staffing burden of maintaining the service.

Addition time and effort is saved when setting up or maintaining user accounts and with the high levels of redundancy and backup integrity, downtime and data loss are avoided almost entirely. Additional savings are made on the purchase and licensing of anti-spam and anti-virus software.

Savings related to capacity requirements also make hosted Exchange very attractive. With an off-site service you only pay for the capacity you use. When maintaining servers on-site, overcapacity problems are generally an unavoidable reality. User storage is also easy to manage and changes can be made quickly and effortlessly with storage options ranging from 1 GB to unlimited storage.

Most Exchange hosts have efficient migration tools available which make swing-overs easy and hassle free. If there are any problems with the service the issue is dealt with by professional service personnel with a minimum of cost and downtime.

These are only a few of the many benefits of running hosted Exchange services. In today's dynamic and competitive business environment these benefits are of great value to all businesses, particularly the smaller enterprise and should be considered seriously.