Email Hosting: An Overview

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GREATER BRAND RECOGNITION WITH

Corporate Email Hosting

W W W . G O 4 H O S T I N G . I N

Contents
Introduction
Executive Summary
Email Hosting: An Overview
Who Uses Email Hosting?

Who Provides Email Hosting?
Why Email Hosting Makes Sense for Businesses
Reasons to Make the Switch to Email Hosting
Benefits of Email Hosting
Challenges and Opportunities for All Sized Businesses
Delivering Security with Corporate Email Hosting
Conclusion

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Introduction
In this realm of fast-paced technology, e-mails have played a vital role in narrowing
down the geographical boundaries for conglomerates, IT behemoths, and individuals.
Undeniably, the advancement of corporate e-mails has overcome the challenges
experienced by conventional communication mediums, making it more innovative and
agile. In this regard, more and more enterprises are leveraging the services provided
by professional and reliable email hosting vendors to streamline their communication
process, curtail complex server management issues, and protect their confidential
business data.
This whitepaper attempts to throw light on why businesses of all shapes and sizes are
adopting corporate email hosting, compares benefits with the challenges faced by
them while switching to this solution, as well as the security implications associated
with different mailing platforms.

Executive Summary
Corporate e-mail hosting solution has emerged as a niche messaging communication
medium, which today influences every corner of the globe. It has turned into a
comprehensive utility service that minimizes the impact of major service outages.
In the hosted e-mail service model, a service provider sited at a remote geographical
location manages all backend services at a flat monthly based user fee. This ensures
stronger information safety and security to an organization’s mission critical
information at economical costs.
According to a recent research conducted by a group of analysts at IDC, the demand
for hosted security solutions is expected to rise by over 30% on an annual basis. In
this context, hosted e-mail security solutions are forecasted to multiply by nearly
eight times compared to the traditional software solutions by the end of this decade.

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“A corporate or business e-mail hosting is a
web-based
hosting
solution
that
provides
electronic mail services via IMAP and POP3
protocols. Since the email servers are managed by
a service provider, it eliminates the requirement
for on-premises email server and IT staff to
manage these servers.”
Email hosting services are mainly used by the small
and medium size businesses (SMBs) that rely on
custom-built email addresses, which match the
name of their website domain to benefit from better
revenue opportunities while minimizing their total
cost of operations. In this way, it allows users to
create multiple email types utilizing the same trailing
address. Most of the larger enterprises run their
own equipment by using software like Postfix or
Microsoft Exchange.

Email Hosting: An Overview
Email hosting is mainly an internet hosting
service. This service ideally manages
electronic messages by means of an email
server. Premium email solutions are provided
by this method at inexpensive prices which is
unlike advertisement-supported free email.

Copyright © Cyber Futuristics India Private Limited.

Did You
Know?
Corporates send &
receive 133 emails/day
on an average
NourGroup

Who Uses Email Hosting?
Email hosting service caters to the needs of demanding email users and Small and
Mid-Size Enterprises(SME). Growing popularity of this service amidst such global
organizations is because it enables the creation of custom email addresses for
employees; these trailing email address are synced with the official website domain.
Numerous email-types are created in the following format.
User_name@domain_name.com
After creation, these email addresses are completely managed by the email hosting
provider.

Administrators

of

the

email

hosting

service

can

enforce

certain

authentication schemes as per the business requirements presented by the owner.
This tactic ensures identification and specific domain qualification criteria for every
email sender. Contrastingly, large corporates make use of third-party software (e.g.
Microsoft Exchange) on their own equipment to run an internal email hosting service.

Who Provides Email Hosting?
Professional email hosting service providers and web hosting companies provide email
hosting services. Investing in email packages from web hosting companies would
entitle a business owner to POP3 email only. Such free email hosting packages include
basic spam/virus protection and ad-support. But these business email operations are
not advisable for corporate use. Rather, professional email hosting services are
recommended for an SME because these are reliable and secured.
A professional email hosting provider makes business email hosting simple. The mailing
platform gets centrally managed on a day-to-day basis. Such providers also have
premium email solution packages hosted on an advanced as well as dedicated email
platform, which are customized as per business critical needs. Providers also render
a rich set of email support features such as:

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Auto responders



Mail rule



Backups



Unlimited aliases



White lists



Contacts management



IMAP/POP3



Blacklists



Archiving



Unlimited forwarders



Online storage



Folder management



Robust spam/virus protection



Calendars



Large attachment



Mailing lists

Email Server

Email
Blackberry

Administrator
Traveling

Global Message
Archiver

Internet

Online News
Internet Fax

Employee

Firewall
Home

Scanned Images
Instant message
Bloomberg Mail

Manager
Email Attachements

By making use of such a hosting service, users can access their email on an
email-client of their choice from any internet enabled device (e.g. smart phone,
blackberry, laptop, netbook, tablet etc.). Technology inclusions may vary across
different email hosting providers, but the ultimate goal is to keep business email
secure and back up the entire service with an industry leading SLA.
Despite the availability of countless free email services, a business branded email is
indispensable. Obtaining such a service through ISP email address (e.g. Gmail) is near
to impossible. So every business house, regardless of its size,ought to communicate
through an exclusive and proprietary email domain name. This requirement gets
fulfilled only when the business house signs up for a robust email hosting service from
a professional vendor.

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Why Email Hosting Makes Sense for Businesses
No doubt, email hosting sets the stage for initiating communication that can continue
effectively without the complexity of email management. This email solution is
integrated with Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook that allow you to
communicate more effectively while keeping your organized emails and files safe. Today,
the lion’s share of organizations are adopting email hosting solution as it has evolved
into a staple communication process featuring sheer speed and cost effectiveness. In
fact, email hosting has now entered the main stream of business strategies with
adopters comprise of SMBs and large enterprises expect to obtain benefit from
affordability, data loss prevention, collaboration, spam, virus and content filtering and
above all business scalability.
Radicati Group, a leading technology market research firm in one of its studies unfolds
that worldwide installed base of email hosting has increased rapidly due to the
amalgamation of high-end features like enterprise-grade messaging and collaboration,
anti-virus and spam-filtering protection, support for wireless email and affordability.
With this email solution, businesses without regard to size are capable of scaling their
goals with email archiving enables them to minimize the need for storage space by
slashing the volume of emails in mailboxes and moving them to static environments. In
fact, the implementation of email hosting frees the IT departments from the hassles
of managing email platforms internally, resulting in reducing the costs of organizations
without affecting their productivity.

Reasons to Make the Switch to Email Hosting
Since email is the primary source of communication within and outside the company,
a robust email hosting solution helps businesses to improve productivity by allowing
them easily access their emails, calendars, contacts, task management tools and so
on. In fact, email hosting works in compliance with business requirements, urging
organizations to adopt it. However, this whitepaper highlights some reasons that
favour organizations to switch to email hosting including:

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Maximum Protection
It is note worthy to mention that service providers of email hosting ensure to provide
guaranteed uptime and integrated disaster recovery solutions through tools such as
IMAP and POP. These tools ensure to protect your data from a myriad of risks and
prevent unauthorized access to your mail. This means that data tempering or theft
doesn’t not exist in this email solution.
Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam Filtering Solution
For those who don’t know, email hosting comes with an anti-virus and anti-spam
service that filters all incoming and outgoing mails of corporations in order for
detecting viruses. Once detected, all unwanted files and messages are sent to the
online quarantine folder to keep your business computers free from troubles. In fact,
this email solution de-clutters your commercial inbox in compliance with your business
requirements.
Increased Efficiency
Adopting this email solution guarantees to optimize the performance of your business
as you are able to communicate flawlessly with your employees, partners and
customers from anytime, anywhere. Also, you can choose different email platforms to
send and receive emails and all this comes under your domain name.
Huge Mailbox Capacity
With email hosting, the storage space you get on per mailbox is adequate to efficiently
run your business without increasing the cost of operation. In fact, you can benefit
from economies of scale by allowing you to pay for the space you use. At the same
time, you can store tens of thousands of emails without being feared of data loss.
Email @ Your Domain Name
Obtaining brand recognition becomes easier with an email hosting plan as you can
email to others or your customers can email you using your domain name, which is
indeed your company’s name.

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Benefits of Email Hosting
E-mail hosting continues to grow among businesses. It has become one of the
essential requirements for every business whether it is an Enterprise or a SME. It
provides businesses the ability to have great email services without spending
additional costs. An e-mail hosting solution ensures better organizational goals and
stable communication process. It adds credible profile to a business or an e-mail
address that would carry the domain name.
Along with numerous benefits, e-mail hosting also provides feature rich exchange
environment and various mailing functionalities. A hosted e-mail solution ensures
complete support against all the difficulties which are associated with server
maintenance.

Chat

Mobile Access

Mailbox Size

Right
MX

Powerful Admin

Anti Spam

Collaboration

Antivirus
Secure File Transfer
Mailbox
Migration

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Sharing

Top 5 Benefits of E-mail Hosting Include
Data Security
One of the most important benefits of e-mail hosting is the security of stored data.
Businesses avail complete data encryption and no unauthorized party can access of it.
E-mail hosting providers generally equip their servers with industry encryption that
means that your data will be completely transitioned and saved for future use.
Adequate Storage
Businesses can avail adequate data storage space with e-mail hosting solutions.
E-mail hosting organizations provide enough storage space to store all confidential
business data and thousands of critical messages. Enterprises and SMEs opt for
flexible e-mail hosting plans which allow them to customize their storage limits.
Businesses can increase and decrease the storage space easily as per their
requirements.
Spam Mail Filtration
E-mail hosting provides spam filtering features which help sorting out unwanted spam
mails. These features separate unwanted emails and allow the important business to
enter inbox. Businesses can check important mails listed in inbox and not waste time
on sorting the spams. Spam mail filtering feature saves business productive time.
Communication for Professionals
Business emails make business communication more professional and transparent.
Organizations can use e-mails for internal and external communication. Enterprises
can communicate internally with all the employees. They can also communicate
externally with customers and stakeholders. Businesses can send business proposal
to the prospective customer through business e-mail account and it creates an
impact. Business e-mails look more professional and convincing than free web mails.
Advanced Features
E-mail hosting comes with numbers of advanced features which web mails don’t
provide. It has numerous added features than just a free e-mail service. There
features are;

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Customization of the size of the mail box size according requirements
Businesses avail features like mail grouping and mail monitoring
Enterprises can avail the feature like sharing contacts, calendars and task with
backup and recovery of deleted mails.
Organizations can even customize their business email service as per business
requirements and according to their e-mail hosting plans.

Challenges and Opportunities for All Sized Businesses
In this digitally-driven economic environment, email
has become an integral and foremost channel of the
business workflow. Businesses of all delineations in
the corporate ecosphere are leveraging this fastest
mode of communication for carrying business
correspondence including sales transactions,
purchase orders, and quotations.

Here, are a few challenges faced by businesses of all contours when deciding to
host and manage their mailing servers in-house:
Upfront Cost
Hosting on-premise comes with enormous overhead cost, including:


Hardware: Depending on the business demands, an emailing platform could

feature one server or ask for extended hardware deployment. Numbers of
hardware equipment installation rise with the outgrowth of emailing transactions,
and storage capacity.


Maintenance: IT technicians are needed all the time to maintain mail server, fix

technical glitches to ensure that communication channel is running faultlessly. In
this light, conducting astute recruitment process to hire knowledgeable
technicians becomes an inevitable need for businesses, which apparently is a
time-consuming process.

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Licensing: On-site email hosting involves licensing fees. Purchasing one license

per user can become too expensive for companies. Additionally, they need to deal
with the complexity of annual renewals, keeping a check on approaching license
expiration date.


Consulting: For hassle-free communication platform, organizations need to

approach experienced consultants on a regular interval of time to fix, install and
upgrade systems.
Infrastructure
Email servers are required to be positioned in an environmentally balanced and
secured place, with adequate power and cooling supply. The cost associated with
power/cooling/security gets increased with each new server added.


Bandwidth: The emailing server shares the bandwidth with every connected

device in the office premises. When the server gets bombarded with heavy traffic
flow, the speed automatically gets slowed down, entailing delayed
sending/receiving of emails.


Connectivity: In order to ensure that emailing server remains up and running all

the time, businesses need to connect or house multiple ISP providers that ensure
fastest internet connectivity.


Redundancy: Protecting email servers against power outages including network

failures, and hardware glitches, companies need to have redundant power
backups, multiple ISP providers, and spare hardware equipment to dispel every
cause of unpredictable disaster.
Security
Vigorous security layers needed to be implemented that help safeguarding an
organization’s confidential data and aid in the enforcement of proper email use.


Physical Security: To create a protected endpoint, organizations are compelled

to have robust security provisions in place to avert email leakage, asset theft and
email loss. This is accomplished by biometric access, video surveillance, employee
access point using multi-layered authentication, tracking and monitoring tools.

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Information Security: Defending organization’s confidential data from email-borne

malware and spam to deliver clean, and promote secure and productive email use
is undeniably critical to business continuity. This is accomplished by implementing
anti-spamming and anti-virus scanning engines. Moreover, attachments carrying
unidentified threats are required to be stopped at the Internet level before
reaching to the user’s mailboxes.
Email Archiving
There is a host of reasons for an enterprise to archive its email including compliance,
storage, litigation and knowledge management. Stringent control and penalties have
mounted pressure on companies to adhere to regulatory compliance more seriously.
Indeed, data and regulatory statutes differ by industries, however all records
pertaining to business activity are subject to compliance regulations. Right from
healthcare industry to banking sectors, IT behemoths and government organizations
archive their emails.
“Bank of America (BoA) was charged $10 million for failing to submit the information
requested by SEC and also for not retaining email records in a stipulated time frame.”

Send E-mail
User B

User A

Journal E-mail

Disk Groups

Journal
Mailbox

Archive E-mail

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E-mail Archive
Services

Database

Archiving emails in-house involves email repository
within the corporate building. The company must
purchase superior email archiving program as well as
the hardware equipment which will host the archive.
Also, archived emails should appropriately index to
enable fast extraction of records to support legal
discovery, and regulatory audit requests.
Scalability
Keeping a pace with the fastest evolving corporate
world is essential for business existence. Deploying
extra hardware equipment, purchasing overpowered
servers and expensive licenses to cater to the
futuristic requirement becomes essential for
in-house email server management and maintenance.

Quick Glance at
Email Hosting
Aspects
Experienced email
administrators set-up,
installs and manages the
system
Technical Support staff is
available around the clock
to handle technical
emergencies
Sensitive emails are
encrypted before they
leave user’s mailbox
Antivirus and Antispyware
protection

Now, let’s throw a light on the various opportunities that
come with hosted email services
Lower Costs
Many entrepreneurs believe that managing email server on-premises is less expensive
than opting for hosted email. However, a research conducted by Osterman reveals
than an onsite 100 seat Exchange deployment costs approximately $49 over a three
year system lifetime, whereas a 1,000-seat Exchange deployment costs $21 per seat
per month, which brilliantly proves the direct cost-savings from hosted email services.
Additionally, email hosting service providers include the licensing costs as part of their
service.
Predictable Costs
Hosted email services provide more predictable costs and scalability than onsite
deployments. An organization that adds new users with every passing day, reaches to
a limit, demanding more servers and other critical components to anticipate incoming
user requests. Hosted email solutions eliminate the hardware, software licensing,
storage and infrastructure expenses.

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Data Backup
With hosted email solutions, the provider proficiently manages the entire backend
infrastructure, including regular/weekly/monthly backups. This mitigates service
outages and protects emails against disastrous events. A hurricane, tornado, fire,
flood can wipe out messaging capabilities in no time, for hours and even for days.
Whereas, hosted email service providers are well-prepared to defy these challenges.
Regular backups and network redundancy maintained by the service provider ensures
uninterrupted communication flow.
Easy Administration
Offsite email hosting providers eliminates almost all the hassles of on-premises email
archives, data backups, setup and installations. An email host swiftly performs all the
routine server management and monitoring tasks including upgrades, and
enhancements.
Email Policy Management
Most of the leading providers incorporate functions to identify and manage sensitive,
malicious email content and images sent/received, which help in reducing email loss
and augments organization’s email ‘acceptable use guidelines’. The add-on service is
included to detect unethical content by analyzing various components including email
body, headers, and subject line.





Email attachments are tracked and scanned for phrases, keywords, URL list, as
determined by the administration.
Block threats across email, before they enters organizations network
Multi-layered protection layer is deployed to safeguard emails against
vulnerabilities
Prevent emails mishandling and enforce Acceptable Use Guidelines

Scalability
Onsite email hosting providers provide huge mailbox capacity as per the business
demand. Businesses need to pay some subscription fee rather than paying fixed
amount for unnecessary overpowered servers, and infrastructure components.
Email Archiving
Email archiving allows organizations to setup access restrictions in order to
safeguard its intellectual property rights and ascertain data integrity and privacy in
compliance to the statutes.

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Anti-virus and Anti-spam filters
Hosted email solutions free organization’s IT team to focus on core competencies
rather than performing mundane management tasks. Robust antivirus and
anti-spamming programs are installed by skilled technicians at service provider’s end.
Hosted services provide a smarter way of outsourcing hardware, software and the
management solutions to cater to the in-house business demands.

Delivering Security with Corporate Email Hosting
With the rising availability and adoption of the Internet, email is quickly replacing both
telephone and fax machines as the principal form of day-to-day business
communication. A study conducted by the Osterman Research illustrates that
organizations using hosted Exchange services in various forms will grow by nearly 11%
across the globe. This can be further depicted in the graph given below:
12%

11.4%

10%
8%

8.0%
6%
4%

5.2%

2%
0%

2012

2013

2014

Evidently, a growing number of businesses are deploying email hosting models to
effectively manage and maintain overhead costs, while securing their critical e-mails
against any disaster or power outages. It further facilitates organizations to:

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Archive their entire inbound email communication
Access emails even if the server goes offline or crashes
Restore involuntarily deleted emails
Integrated security against virus and other nasty malwares

In this light, ensuring email security plays a pivotal role in filtering-out spams and
other unsolicited information. This means, viruses are isolated and intercepted before
delivering messages to the users, ensuring that data and mail server are not affected
by malware in the transit. Besides, deploying software solutions, organizations can
ascertain email security in following ways:
Email Encryption
Securing business communication by authenticating email messages is often used by
enterprises to protect the privacy of their critical content. Based on the rising
volumes of sensitive and confidential information traversing across company’s
network on a daily basis, various regulations like HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, and
PCI have been introduced by the business executives and regulatory bodies to
mandate that corporate messages with sensitive messages are handled securely.
Hence, email encryption is considered as an important aspect of managing overall
email security of the confidential information. It allows a free flow of communication
between a business and its employees, customers, and partners.

Private Area

Did You Know?

Public Area
Secure
Email
Received

1

We spend 41%
of our valuable
time in
managing
e-mails.

Partner
supports
encryption

2
Your Secure
Email Gateway

Sentinel
Platform

Partner does
not support
encryption

Email
Notice

+

Secure
Web Link

Copyright © Cyber Futuristics India Private Limited.

Did You
Know?

Secure
Email
Received

NourGroup

Cloud Email Security
As enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud technology and are moving their
business mailboxes to the cloud, third party service providers are deploying solutions
to protect their confidential messages against any online threats. The cloud-based
email security approach works between the mail server of the vendor and the Internet.
This ensures that the content is free from virus and verifies the standard policy
guidelines are met before it is sent to the user. This delivers a host of benefits to
organizations, including:






Scanning viruses for inbound and outbound messages passes through the cloud
Filtering spams and blacklisting content with intercepted malwares
Maintaining centralized content with regular system updates
Implementing web-based consoles for easy configuration of security settings
Monitoring email traffic on a regular basis to avoid points of failover

In addition, there are acquisition and operational benefits of following cloud approach,
which eliminates physical hardware costs, site maintenance costs, and expenditure
for acquiring software licenses.
Customized Threat Filtering
As data breach is on the rise, technology pundits anticipate that organizations across
the globe will invest in multi-layered filtering mechanisms. From start-ups to big size
enterprises, security threats have underscored the universal ecosystem. To this end,
applying a holistic approach that combines both automated and advanced analytics
can continuously monitor and analyze blends of information to make a threat
assessment. For this purpose, most of the service providers apply scanning
technology to identify and filter inbound & outbound spams, without blocking the
legitimate emails. The customizable mail scanning technologies use integrated threat
intelligence to continuously track malicious IP addresses and block potential threats
from identified targets, along with rising threats from zombies and botnets. The
antivirus and antispam engines are powered by the integrated security tools for
preventing spamming, phishing, spyware, viruses, and various other malware.

Copyright © Cyber Futuristics India Private Limited.

Conclusion
Corporate e-mail hosting service is a smarter way of outsourcing hardware, software
and managing day-to-day communication to cater to various in-house business demands. It provides credible profile to organizations to set-up its goals and encourages
enterprises, irrespective of size and nature of business, to avail email hosting plans
for keeping their emails and files safe. Exclusive and proprietary email domain names
deliver a competitive edge to organizations, which stands testimony to the fact that,
professional email hosting service eliminates the need for setting up IT teams and inhouse email servers. Likewise, email domain names are secured, customizable, and affordable solution that meets various business communication requirements of all the
organizations.
Go4Hosting.in is a leading provider of cogent email hosting solutions at affordable
prices. Our customized hosting plans are designed to help businesses in keeping their
emails safe, while enabling them to achieve economies of scale and reducing their cost
of operations.
For more information, please visit our website www.go4hosting.in

Copyright © Cyber Futuristics India Private Limited.

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