Why use Microsoft 365 or Hosted Exchange for your email?

Sometimes our clients prefer to use Office 365 (now called Microsoft 365) or Hosted Exchange for their email, and for most of our business clients, we even recommend doing this. We can of course set up your Office 365 or Hosted Exchange emails to work with your domain on our hosting service, and we do this free of charge. If you already have email set up elsewhere thats fine too!

So, what is the difference in using a hosted email service from Microsoft compared to using an email service provided by your web hosting provider, and in what scenarios would it better to go for the enterprise email service?

Portability/Business Continuity

The first benefit of using an external hosted email service is the ability to move your web hosting service or even your domain without any interruptions to your email service.

If you ever need to migrate your website to a different web host, or maybe you have decided to go with a different web developer, then having your emails with a service like Microsoft 365 or Hosted Exchange makes this really easy, your new web host or web developer just needs to ensure that your DNS records get copied over and your email just continues to work as normal.

If your email is provided by a web host however, when you move to a new host you need to ensure you have downloaded or archived all of your emails and then your email accounts need to be set up on the new webhost. This is reasonably straightforward, but its possibly a complication that you can do without.

Enhanced Security

One thing guaranteed with using 365 or Hosted Exchange is the built-in security. Microsoft will deliver enterprise-level security to ensure your communications are protected against any kind of threat or security breach attempts. These security requirements are generally better than web hosting email services.

Additionally, Microsoft Exchange is compliment across all major standards of compliance like IOS 27001. HIPAA and FISMA.

Data Safeguards

Data loss prevention capabilities prevent users from mistakenly sending sensitive information to unauthorised people. Globally redundant servers, premier disaster recovery capabilities, and a team of security experts monitoring Exchange Online around the clock to safeguard your data. This doesn’t mean your data is not safe with regular web hosting email, it just means you less likely to lose any data.

Reliability

Microsoft guarantee 99.9% uptime, and a financially-backed service level agreement. You could of course go months or years using regular email from your hosting provider with no issues at all, but Microsoft stakes their reputation on services like hosted exchange and Microsoft 365, so we generally say their service can be considered more reliable than web host email.

More than just email

Hosting your email on a Microsoft Exchange Server or Microsoft 365 offers you more than just email. It comes with fully-managed calendaring, contacts and task organization – all in one easy-to-access place. Combined with Exchange’s AJAX Web Mail Interface, which allows you to access your email from any web browser.

Conclusion

If your business views email communication as absolutely critical and you want to reduce any risk of downtime or data loss, then Microsoft 365 or Hosted Exchange is probably a good option for you.

Even if you aren’t overly concerned about these things, the benefit of your email service being backed by one of the biggest companies in the world, and the peace of mind that knowing your email will still work regardless of what happens with your web hosting server is something that can be very attractive to even a small business.

Hosted Exchange is very affordable at under £4 per user per month, so it can be a good option even for smallest business.

If you would like to talk to us about setting up Microsoft 365 or Hosted Exchange for your domain, just get in touch.