4 Benefits of Cloud Email

Reliable email functionality is an absolute must for any business today. Internal email services housed on your own servers used to be the gold standard for many enterprises, yet today’s cloud-based options offer far greater scalability and flexibility than server-based email. This more efficient combination has lead more businesses to choose cloud email instead. There are four basic benefits of making the switch to cloud-based email for business.

1. No Server Maintenance

No one except the most committed technophile is interested in server maintenance in any way. Servers are complex, they’re expensive, and they seem to need updating roughly every other minute or so. Moving over to cloud email instead of server-based email means moving this portion of your IT costs from variable to fixed (much to your accounting department’s delight). Cloud-based email is a great solution for companies with a strapped IT budget:

• Your techs are freed up from spending their valuable time fiddling around with email.
• Removing the hardware element allows techs to concentrate on new projects that add value rather than rote maintenance.
• Your IT department can focus its energies where you’ll get a far bigger bang for your buck.
• You’ll enjoy significant savings on energy and hardware investments by taking email servers out of the picture.

2. Easier Disaster Recovery

If the worst does come to pass and your internal server or network become compromised, every smidgen of data in your emails is also at risk. Think for a minute about every file, spreadsheet or contract agreement that’s sitting in your email archives at this very moment, and then imagine how drastically your business would be impacted by the loss of all that vital information.

With cloud email, problems with hardware really don’t matter as far as email is concerned. Your laptop crashes? No problem—all your emails are stored in the cloud. Grab a loaner machine from the IT guys and sign right back on for business as usual. When emails are based in the cloud, your records are more than recoverable: they’re always there.

3. Anywhere Access

Who hasn’t gotten halfway home only to realize they forgot their work-issued laptop back at the office with all those emails they meant to catch up on over the weekend? For companies who operate on server-based email systems, this means a lost work weekend for sure.

• Cloud-based email can be accessed from anywhere, on any device.
• Email access is immediately available from your home computer, tablet or even from your smartphone.
• Productivity levels increase, particularly for remote workers
• Cloud-based email accounts sync up instantly and automatically, so data is accessible from multiple devices.

4. Collaboration

Where the three advantages listed above really shine is during collaborative work efforts, whether among remote employees or varying office locations. Instant access to the latest information available about ongoing projects is invaluable in today’s fast-paced work environment, especially if combined with other collaborative tools:

• Real-time project collaboration and document editing
• Video and voice conferencing
• Instant project updates
• High storage capacity for sending and storing multimedia-rich emails, including video messages

Best of all, users know they always have the latest project updates and most recent emails, since the cloud is on and accessible 24/7/365.

The Bottom Line

Organizations have to become more agile than ever before if they want to succeed while running at the nearly instantaneous pace that defines modern business operations. Cloud email is one tool that speaks to this need by eliminating many of the hassles and time-suck factors associated with traditional server-based email systems. Cloud-based email fades into the background for a reliable, always-on work environment that allows companies to simply focus on daily operations instead.