Email – It’s time to ditch that Exchange Server!

Why are you hosting your email yourself?

In my travels around SMBs it comes as no surprise that I find that some are still hosting their email system themselves on their own Windows in-house server(s).

That comes as no surprise as many IT Service providers still advocate the inappropriate use of in-house servers for email. It's in their own financial interest to do so.

When I pose the question "why do you host your email yourselves?"  the responses I get fall into the following categories:

1.  Because our IT service provider advised us to (no surprise there!)
2. Or, "because we can add as many mailboxes as we like at no extra cost!" and "we're in control!"

So, why am I writing this article proposing that those businesses ditch hosting their email system themselves?

Risk, Cost and The future!

Hosting you own email service has no longer a necessity for a long time. Microsoft's Exchange Online service via Microsoft 365 is a much better alternative, without losing any control. Let's deal with the issues you face by hosting your email system in-house:

Risk:

• Availabilty: Severs go down, when your mail server is down, for whatever reason, you email system stops for the duration. Routers go down, when that happens, your email system stops.
• Performance: If your mail system is running on the same server as everything else performance for the other functions the server is running will, over time, degrade.. The more mailboxes you add, the worse it gets. Exchange requires and takes a lot of resource and even if you manually restrict that resource, the slower your mail system becomes.
• Spam & Malware: Filtering out the risk posed by spam and malware in self hosted email systems is a complex and skilled job. In my experience, more often that not it's not been configured properly, if at all, or the installation of a spam server has been required.
  
• Data Loss: If you suffer hardware failure and you haven't got disaster recover covered off, you've lost all your email history and, even worse, the entire mail system configuration.

Cost:

• Hardware: Your initial investment in hardware to run your mail system isn't where it ends. Unless you vastly over configured the specification of your hardware platform when you bought and installed it, you will need to keep adding to it as the mail system grows in terms of mailboxes and use. Your hardware will need to be replenished and replaced over time.
• Licensing: For those that are not running their own Exchange Server, the cost of licensing, including User client access licenses, is not cheap. As new versions of Exchange are released, you are into more cost by having to re-licence in order to upgrade to get access to the extra functionality offered by those products.
• People: Exchange servers don't manage themselves. They need constant monitoring and when they go down, they need manual intervention to fix. These people costs, whether they be internal staff or third party I.T. support personnel, have to be paid for. 

So, what's the alternative?

Simple! Give serious consideration to moving over to Exchange Online in Microsoft 365.

Using Exchange Online, whether it be via one of the Microsoft 365 Business Plans, Enterprise Plans or the Exchange Online Plans, takes away the the risks and costs outlined above associated with running an Exchange server in-house. By decoupling your email system from your in-house server(s), you will also gain the benefit of making moving to a new server environment and architecture in the future to run your other business applications much easier and far less expensive!

Through the Exchange Online Plan 1, the cost per mailbox is £3.10 per user mailbox per month and will provide every thing most business require of their mail system, and you get whopping 50GB mailbox! Don't forget that a 50GB mailbox is included in the Business basic, Business Standard and Business premium M365 Business licences.

Those costs, at first sight may seem a blocker. Don't be put off straight away, do your maths. Work out the current cost of ownership of running your In-house Exchange server, weigh up the risks outlined in ths document and take into account the future! All of a sudden, the Exchange Online cost will seem excellent value for money.

Yes, there is a cost involed in migrating your email history to Exchange Online and setting up the environment, but it's not as expensive as you may think. Microsoft Cloud Partners like myself can undertake the move for you and, because we have great third party toolsets at our disposal, the cost becomes very affordable.

So, make the move and ditch that Exchange Server!

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