5 Benefits of Managed Email Hosting Services for Small Business

As a business owner, it is crucial to project a positive image of your brand. Your customers or clients often decide whether to go in business with you by superficial observations of your company. For example, when your business emails are coming from personal email accounts (e.g. @bigpond.com), or they are continuously flagged as spam, it does not give the best impression of your products or services.

In a competitive environment, it is essential to maintain a professional image to your customers, suppliers, and even to your competition. Relying on a managed email hosting service can be a great way to demonstrate you mean business.

In this article, we review the main benefits of having a managed IT services provider (MSP) manage your email service.

Comprehensive Support

Having difficulties with technology is a time-waster. Your employees may forget their login passwords, lost a few emails or not able to access their emails on the go from a smartphone. These issues will not only take time to resolve them but keeps your staff distracted from more important aspects of your business.

Sponsorships Available

Sponsorships Available

Sponsorships Available

How can you deliver an excellent service when your business is bogged down with mundane technology issues?

With a hosted email service, on the other hand, technical support is available just a phone call away. A managed IT services provider (MSP) assures that any issue with your email service is resolved quickly and efficiently when a problem arises.

You can enjoy the peace of mind by knowing that email is always a reliable mean of communication between your staff and your clients. After all, email is one of the most essential tools in a business.

Service Scalability and Ease of Use

Your email service should be capable of growing together with your business. No matter if you are hiring new staff, or start sending or receiving a large number of emails, your email service should be flexible enough to support your business.

Advanced email platforms, such as Office 365 and G Suite, can back you in these situations. These email services both:

• come with large mailboxes by default; and
• can handle hundreds or even thousands of mailboxes; and
• is capable to onboard new members of staff in a matter of minutes.

Besides, these services all come with desktop apps and webmail interfaces (e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Gmail.com) your staff is already familiar with. Furthermore, mobile applications for Android and iPhone devices are also available. The ease of use of these platforms allows your team to get on track with these platforms in no time.

Increased Business Productivity

When you decide to go with one email platforms offered by your MSP, they feature a large range of free add-ons. The most popular email platforms from Microsoft and Google come with a productivity tools that were designed with small businesses in mind.

For example, you can use the built-in audio/video conferencing service to call your clients or organise online meetings for your staff. Both Office 365 and G Suite comes with screen sharing solutions, chat and collaboration tools, cloud-based file storage solutions, document writing and collaboration tools and much more. Your bare bones email provider cannot compete with the additional features.

Hacking and Data Breach Protection

A managed business email hosting service usually comes with additional measures to protect from a wide range of cyber attacks including hacking, phishing, email spoofing and business email compromise fraud.

A well-kept email service that is set up and maintained by professional features security measures that ensure the safety of all your data.

Managed email services typically come with value-added services such as a data backup and recovery solution. Regularly taken offsite backups can protect your company from a data-loss disaster in cases of an accidental and intentional file and email deletion, or data corruption issues.

Other benefits, such as phishing protection can keep your business safe and secure from accidents, hackers, ransomware or even employees with malicious intent.

Low Management Costs

The total cost of ownership of a managed email hosting service is always lower than managing your email service in-house.

First of all, IT service providers can take advantage of the economies of scale. They have access to software licenses and subscription fees on a wholesale price just because they manage more email accounts than an average company.

Secondly, you and your staff’s time is valuable, which is better spent on developing your own business. As the service provider takes care of the initial setup, email migration, general troubleshooting and service requests, you do not need to spend any resources on things that are not your core business.

Summary

Email services may look similar when it comes to core functionality (i.e. sending and receiving messages), but they are not made equal. Managed email services are a secure, low-cost and business-grade alternative to email services offered by free email providers, domain name registrars or in-house managed email servers.

The author is an IT Service Manager at Arrow Networks, a managed IT services provider offering business email hosting services for small businesses. The article has first appeared on the Arrow Networks IT Blog.