Are 100% Hosted Email Solutions Ready For Prime Time?

While Microsoft Exchange has its advantages, the convenience and the declining cost of hosted email solutions make us dig deeper into the hosted option.  Compliance, Security, Archival and Spam Filtering capabilities along with satisfactory Service Level Agreements (SLAs) make them even more interesting. 

Microsoft offers hosted Exchange service.  The company also sells software to hosting providers that deliver Microsoft applications using a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.  Stability and functionality of the applications were said to be issues.

MessageLabs, McAfee, Symantec, Google’s Postini and Yahoo’s Zimbra also provide hosted messaging solutions.   Apptix and Navisite  provide managed applications and collaboration services.  Hardware vendor Cisco is also in the game after acquiring IronPort. 

We have heard some companies moving to 100% hosted email solutions for a nominal annual cost per user as it is cost effective compared to on site email solutions.   However, on site solutions might continue to be main stream for a while given the potential latency in recovering inadvertently filtered emails and the possibility of unexpected and long downtimes in hosted email solutions. 

As always, please feel free to share your thoughts.