Hosted Exchange Email Service Advantages

POP3 is the email service we love to hate. Both businesses and individuals are so entrenched with POP3 email that switching to something else seems like a major and unnecessary upset. Here’s why you should consider just such a move and the benefits you’ll enjoy if you do.

Just what is POP3 anyway? POP stands for Post Office Protocol. It’s a longstanding Internet standard offered by nearly all Internet Service Providers (ISPs). POP3 refers to the 3rd version of this standard, which is the current version.

POP email is based on a client-server model. The email server is provided by your ISP, email service provider, employer data center or Web hosting company. The client is installed on your PC. When your PC mail is active, the client checks periodically, say every 5 minutes, with the server to see if there is new mail. If so, the client downloads it to the PC. Most people have it set up to delete downloaded email messages from the server, but you can leave them up there if you wish. The only problem with this is that messages pile up and you can run out of your assigned storage quickly.

What’s a client? Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail and Eudora are examples of POP email clients. What they have in common is that they are installed on a particular computer, store your messages locally on that computer, and communicate with a POP3 server over the Internet.

An advantage of POP3 is that once the mail is downloaded, you don’t have to be online to read your messages. You know that if you are using Webmail and lose your Internet connection, you’ve lost your link to your email account. With POP3, you can read your stack of messages, put them in particular files for storage, and search your computer to find an old email message.

That’s the good part. The bad part is that if you lose your computer, say a laptop, or your hard drive crashes, you can lose years of valuable email messages in an instant. Unless you’ve backed them up somewhere they are gone for good. If you trade up to a new computer, you have to transfer all those messages, too, or you won’t be able to get to them. Also, any messages that came into your desktop computer and were deleted from the server won’t be accessible on your laptop computer when you are out and about. The reverse is also true.

Then there’s the really bad part. That’s the spam and viruses that we’re constantly fending off. Many of us have far more spam messages come in than legitimate ones. Email clients have the ability to detect spam to some extent and sent it to a separate spam file. You may have a separate spam and virus program to protect your PC. Today, many service providers have a first line of defense spam and virus protection on their email servers. That helps, but a lot of junk still gets through.

Companies that want control of their corporate email run their own email servers, either in their own data centers or space rented from colocation data centers. One of the most popular server programs is Microsoft Exchange. Exchange expands pure vanilla POP email to support voice mail storage, calendar, contact organizing, faxes, and public folders for sharing information among employees. All of this is protected by secure transfers and anti-virus and anti-spam filtering in the server itself.

Microsoft Exchange is great for large corporate IT departments that have the staff and data center resources to run their own Exchange servers. Small and medium size companies may find this too much to deal with and revert to consumer grade email services or Web mail accounts just to have some way to send and receive messages. There is another option available for just these companies. It’s called Hosted Exchange.

Hosted Exchange gives you all the advantages of Microsoft Exchange without the headache of running your own server. The hosting is done by a hosting or cloud services company. They provide you with your own instance of Microsoft Exchange running on their servers. You connect via the Internet or dedicated telecom line.

With Hosted Exchange service, you not only lose the server disadvantage, but you gain the advantages of having your service in the cloud. Those include routine automatic backups so you won’t lose data. You can access your messages from your desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet from wherever you happen to be. If you accidentally delete an important email, you can generally recover your messages or entire mailboxes even weeks later. Your private mail will stay private, too. All communication with the Hosted Exchange server is done using SSL encryption just like you’d use for online shopping or banking.

Is it time you made the move to a more modern and capable email system? If so, consider Hosted Exchange email service options in the cloud. It can handle as many users and as much data as you need and offers considerable cost savings over doing it yourself.

Microsoft Communication In The Integra Cloud

There’s no doubt that business communication is getting more sophisticated. A multi-line telephone and a FAX machine might have sufficed years ago. Now, email is so last century. If you want to be on top of the productivity curve, you need have collaboration and unified communications in your tool set.

Sounds great, but how are you set up to support all the latest business communication services? Larger enterprises have dedicated staff to handle hardware, software, mobility, VPNs and everything else needed to support their electronic communication needs. Small and medium size companies aren’t so flush. If they can afford the cost of the servers and software packages, they may well need to depend on outside consultants to get everything working together and fight fires as they pop up. Otherwise, it’s get by as best you can. Seems like there ought to be a better way.

The cloud may well be that better way. The idea of cloud communications is that all the intricacies involved in multi-media electronic communication is hidden from the user. The provider takes care of the servers, the software, the maintenance, the integration, the setup and the troubleshooting. As a user, you do just that: You use the service. When you have trouble or need some extra feature, you call the service provider and they take care of it for you. Because they specialize in the cloud services they are offering, they have the resources to handle everything efficiently. Instead of investing and operating, you simply use and pay by the month for each user you have on-board.

A powerful combination of service and provider is Microsoft Communication Services and Integra Telecom. You are no doubt familiar with Microsoft software such as Outlook, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint. Are you aware that these services have been integrated with Microsoft Office Communications Server as a bundled cloud-based resource? Have a look at this video for a quick introduction:



Have you been toying with the idea of Hosted Microsoft Exchange or Hosted Outlook because you really don’t want to run your own data center? Why not go with the whole package of Microsoft Communication Services and leap to the cutting edge in one fell swoop? By the time you factor in what it will cost you to do everything this suite of communication services does in a piecemeal fashion, you might as well go with the cloud service and a solid provider.

How do you find a good provider? Start with Integra Telecom. They are more than just a cloud service provider. They are actually a competitive telecommunications carrier that has expanded their domain to include cloud services as well as connectivity. With Integra you have one point of contact and all the expertise to ensure that the services work correctly, plus assurance that you are efficiently connected at all times.

Integra runs an 11 state fiber optic network with 1,900 fiber fed buildings and many more connected via Ethernet over Copper. They provide high bandwidth services to customers in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah and Washington. They offer a complete range of telecom services that includes business phone lines and trunks, hosted PBX services, private networking including MPLS VPN and private line services, high speed Internet access, server colocation and cloud-based collaboration and messaging.

Have you reached the limits of what you can afford to purchase or support, yet need the productivity improvements that come with the latest unified communications services? You may find that cloud hosted solutions can give you far more for your dollar than doing it all yourself. Before you give up in frustration, get a quick quote for cloud communications services scaled to the size of your business. You may be able to afford a lot more than you think.

The Rush To Cloud Service Data Centers

There’s a major migration afoot. It’s a move, almost a stampede, from in-house server rooms to public data centers worldwide. Let’s take a look at what this trend is all about and where it may be leading.

The original reason for companies to consider data center colocation was cost savings. The tradeoff is fairly simple. Instead of your organization building and operating its own data center, you ship your servers, switches, routers and network appliances off to a colo facility. That facility offers cost savings through economy of scale. Instead of each business having to come up with environmentally controlled real estate, fire suppression, backup generator power and high bandwidth connectivity, the larger colocation company provides these facilities for hundreds or thousands of customers.

A colo or “carrier hotel”, as they were originally called when the main customers were competitive local exchange carriers, can provide the 24/7 technical staffing that you may not be able to afford. They’ve expanded their suite of services to rent not just rack and cage space, but servers themselves. You no longer have to buy and ship your own equipment. You can rent what you need and have it all set up for you. Even ongoing maintenance can be outsourced to the colo so that your only responsible for the applications you are running.

There is a blending of missions between colocation data centers and hosting companies. The colocation centers have become hosts with the addition of dedicated servers and even virtual servers.

The latest trend in IT is cloud computing and this is where colocation data centers are headed. One good example is PAETEC, a competitive telecom carrier with a national service footprint. PAETEC is known for it’s voice and data services that include T1 lines, DS3, SIP trunking, MPLS networks, OCx fiber optic bandwidth, and Ethernet over copper and fiber connections. Now PAETEC is on a major building spree to nearly triple its 7 data centers spread across the country.

What’s prompting this expansion? It’s all about the cloud. Corporate America has discovered cloud services as a way to control costs, increase flexibility and avoid sometimes unavailable capital investments in infrastructure. The idea of the cloud is very much like the concept of the colocation center with some capability expansions. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows you to rent all the servers and their related facilities that you need. The difference is that the architecture of the cloud is about making it easy to add and subtract resources rapidly. You can do that when servers are virtual and there are massive amounts of networked disk storage to draw from.

PAETEC is offering cloud-based products in their data centers that include dedicated servers, virtual servers, managed storage on demand and more. Hosted Exchange gives companies a Microsoft Exchange E-Mail server with PAETEC technicians and engineers available for support.

Is it time for your company to consider a move to the cloud or relocation to a colocation center to reduce costs and gain access to more resources as needed? If so, get pricing and availability of Cloud and Colocation Data Center Services near your location.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.