When you think of mission-critical applications, nuclear reactors or life support systems likely come to mind. Believe it or not, email, an application we don’t think much about because it’s so interwoven into our lives, is also a mission-critical application. Loss in its availability doesn’t typically have life or death consequences, but for companies in the business of health and safety, it very well could.
Across all of modern commercial activity, email is an indispensable connective tissue between almost every thought and action, unifying disparate employees into symbiotic ecosystems. If any company loses email functionality, it’s effectively crippled. Just hours of email downtime often result in severe financial losses, not to mention the opportunity cost of missed opportunities. That’s why companies have migrated their email workloads en masse from traditional on-prem, self-managed systems to the leading cloud-based alternatives. They do so in order to seize the benefits of their guaranteed resiliency and ability to mitigate downtime through their well-honed operational excellence.
Why Outsource Your Corporate Email
There are several reasons to outsource corporate email systems. First, it enables companies to rid themselves of cumbersome server-based architecture. By not having to manage the underlying infrastructure, companies don’t have to worry about managing a data center or server room environment and continually refreshing hardware every three years or so. Similarly, commercial users don’t have to worry about maintaining or upgrading software.
Overall, what formerly required capital expenditures now requires operational costs with a lower TCO. Also, the leading services, such as Microsoft Office 365 and G Suite, provide employees with additional collaborative tools, such as cloud storage, chat, and shared document creation.
How to Simplify the Migration of Your Email
The benefits of cloud-based email offerings are clear, but it’s not always that simple to migrate from traditional platforms, such as IMAP or Microsoft Exchange. There’s a considerable amount of up-front discovery and decision-making to be done.
Companies that embark on any sort of digital transformation project, including something that may seem simple, such as email migration, experience a high failure rate if they go about it alone and abandon the project. That’s why companies hire a managed service provider to orchestrate the migration for them.
The ideal partner offering G Suite or Office 365 migration support, for example, takes a highly consultative approach. They conduct the initial discovery and make decisions surrounding licensing, user identity management, and authentication based on the client’s desired business outcome.
The provider also is sensitive to customer’s specific compliance requirements and coordinates data replication and back up regiments to ensure the invaluable data distributed across the email platform is never irrecoverable. There are several migration partners to choose from, but it’s important to select one that is focused on delivering added security on top of the standard toolsets offered directly by the email provider.
After a successful migration, the perfect partner’s support does not stop at implementation. The ultimate goal of eliciting the help of a managed services provider is to free internal teams of day-to-day support and maintenance, so they can focus on growth initiatives. They also deliver ongoing support for cloud-based email service, respond directly to end-users that may have issue with the service, leveraging their expertise with the platform. They offer stringent SLAs, guaranteeing rapid responses and resolutions. Perhaps, most importantly, they are present throughout the entire lifecycle of the project and are well-positioned to scale the email application as the customer’s business grows.