As I was setting up my own domain, my hosting provider (DreamHost — they are awesome!), offered something that I was not aware about. I could use Google to manage my email. Really?
Having been a trusted user of Gmail when it came out years ago, I was ecstatic at the notion. But to run it from my own domain? Yep. You can have first.last@yourdomain.com and have it managed through Google using Google Apps.
Corporate IT executives I believe are missing a huge opportunity to outsource their entire email infrastructure.
Email has become one of the most vital pieces of an organizations capabilities. If you had a choice, why would you:
1. Buy your own hardware: lots of money spent on equipment that depreciates like a car the minute you buy it.
2. Pay staff to support it. Resources to manage your email infrastructure are going to be sizable. A single engineer with the necessary system administrative background is going to be around $75K for a mid-level resource.
3. Risk a disaster and recovery nightmare. Email servers routinely die and run into corruption issues with their information on the disk drive.
These hardware failures and recovery sessions turn into nail-biting, high intensity adrenaline jumps for the tech professionals having to manage the experience. God forbid you lose the CEO or President’s mailbox. Keep your resume updated.
Using Gmail/Google Apps you get:
1. System Stability
2. Universal Access: if you have an internet connection – you can get your email. Think about that disaster recovery plan.
3. Massive Storage – for free! 7 GB of disk storage for email; 25 GB for $50/user. Think about all the political nightmares avoided by being able to successfully sustain an almost limitless amount of storage for a given user.
4. Fast Search Capabilities. Looking for an old email in exchange can take forever if you are performing a search across your entire mailbox.
5. Google Ads: timely placed information from vendors based upon the subject of your email.
I recently found a logo design company, mycustomlogo.com, because I was sending an email about that type of subject to a colleague. You could never dream of that kind of functionality through exchange.
Clearly this is the way to go for the small firm but I believe that even the larger enterprises are missing out on a key cost containment strategy. The premier edition of the service provides additional features which address security and integration issues that would normally prevent you from making such a decision. The capabilities are there for a clearly defined annual subscription price per-user. So what are you waiting for?