There are many reasons to consider outsourcing your organization’s email versus keeping it in-house. Not only can outsourcing save time and money, it also offers greater security and reliability. For both small business owners and IT managers, moving to an outsourced solution places the responsibility of maintaining and managing the email infrastructure in the hands of a trusted email hosting partner.

Many businesses initially build or buy an in-house mail server in the interest of protecting their correspondence. However, unless the server is properly maintained, an in-house server may offer less security than a managed outsourced solution. At the very least junk mail, viruses and attacks may unexpectedly grind your email services to a halt. In a disaster scenario, an in-house server hard drive failure could result in a total loss of data.

Outsourced email offers a managed hosting solution and can provide enterprise class reliability. In choosing an email hosting partner, you should look for both network and storage redundancy. The goal in building a redundant email platform is to minimize points of failure and optimize the hosting servers for email. To accomplish this, hosting companies employ clustering technologies. A hosting cluster should include load balancers, multiple mail servers, and raid array file storage. Finally, an outsourced solution should include both nightly mirrored disk backups and remote tape backups.

Most hosting providers base plan pricing on the number of email accounts. Depending on your client application requirements, you may want to confirm that the hosting platform supports both POP3 and IMAP protocols. For outgoing mail, check to make sure your provider supports SMTP Authentication. An outsourced email solution should also include an easy to use web based administration panel, web mail, managed virus protection, firewall security and spam control. Added features should include mail forwards, vacation messages, auto-responders, aliases and phone support.

Adam Hayes manages Greatmail's email hosting services. Plans include virus protection, advanced spam filtering, firewall protection, email forwarding and autoresponders. Visit Greatmail on the web at http://www.greatmail.com.