After building a strong foundation and addressing your business’ vision, culture, and leadership, it’s time to move the different aspects of digital transformation.
Remember that the road to digital transformation is different for everybody.
- Does your company limit the amount of email storage you can have at any time?
- Do you have to keep deleting your messages because your inbox is full and can’t receive new messages?
- Or have you experienced not being able to access your email for a couple of days because your IT department is doing some server maintenance?
What if you didn’t have to deal with this problem anymore? What if you have virtually unlimited storage? What if you can access your emails 24/7, anywhere you are in the world?
Why should you use cloud-based email?
Using cloud-based email allows you more flexibility in storage, less maintenance, scalability, and many more. Find out the 7 reasons why you should migrate your email to the cloud.
7 Reasons to Migrate Your Email to the Cloud
Migrating email from a self-hosted to cloud-hosted might seem like a very simple task. But if you look at it more closely, there are a few variables you need to consider.
In order to create a seamless migration from your local mail server to the cloud (like Microsoft or Google), all user accounts and data must remain in-tact. This includes every single mail folder and every message. Users should not be able to detect that anything has changed.
1. More storage
Migrating to a cloud-based email allows you to virtually have unlimited storage. On-premise email servers are often limited by their storage.
For example, your IT administrator might only allow you to keep 512 MB worth of email at any point in time. When your usage exceeds that, you won’t be able to receive new messages. You will then have to delete some (or all) your email before you receive new messages.
Imagine the consequences of this to your business if you forget to manage your email storage. What do you think would happen if you miss emails like these:
- email from a dissatisfied customer who happens to also be one of your key accounts
- email from a supplier/vendor saying that they won’t be able to deliver your order on time — which would cause you to miss your own targets
- email from your boss or colleague about a critical status update on a project you are working on
When you migrate your email to the cloud, you won’t have to deal with these issues.
Why?
Because all cloud email providers start you off with a huge amount of storage. For example, a personal Gmail account will give you 15 Gb of storage, while a business account starts with 30Gb. A Microsoft subscription will start you off with 1 Gb per user.
2. Faster disaster recovery
Most businesses don’t often think of disaster recovery until it happens to them. By then, it would be too late.
Let’s say a fire started in your office caused by one of the other tenants in the building. What if this happened during the weekend?
If you don’t have a disaster recovery program in place and your office got caught in the fire (or flood, or earthquake, or some other disaster), how long do you think you can resume business?
With cloud-based email, you won’t have to worry about this yourself. Your provider will take care of this for you. And more likely, they will already have a disaster recovery program in place.
For example, Microsoft and Google (two big names in cloud-hosted email) have millions of servers (housed inside data centres) across the world. So, if something happened to the data centre in North America or Asia, you would still be able to access your emails because they are backed up in another data centre in another continent.
3. Less server maintenance
One of the best practices of on-site servers is to conduct frequent preventive maintenance. This ensures that both the hardware and software running is at optimal conditions.
Backups and other stuff are performed during this time as well.
While this practice is true for all servers, if you’re using a cloud-based email that means you don’t have to do this yourself.
You don’t have to allot resources — time and money — to do the maintenance.
Oftentimes, when your IT administrator performs server maintenance, work stops for the entire business. That’s why maintenance work is done during weekends and/or nighttime or early morning.
But in today’s world where our customers expect us to be there for them 24/7, we can’t afford to be “offline” for a couple of days.
4. Enable remote work
As you may have already noticed, the work you do today can be done outside the office. As technology improves, you can pretty much do a lot of things with a laptop or your phone and an internet connection. That means you don’t need to be in the office in order to work.
This is the trend globally — remote work or telecommuting. That’s why you see people working in cafes, at home, or even in transit.
With an on-premise email server, you won’t have this luxury. Sometimes, you can only access your email if you’re connected to the company network. That means you have to be in your office premises.
Or in other cases, you will be limited by your access.
Oftentimes, you can only access your email accounts from a work-issued device. So, if you happen to forget that at home or left it at the office, you can’t check your email using your phone or personal laptop.
5. Cost savings
The pricing of cloud-based email is often on a per-user basis.
What that means is you don’t have to pay upfront a huge amount as compared to when you use an on-premise server. Depending on the one you buy, this could easily be a few thousand dollars. This will probably last you for 2-3 years before it starts showing signs of aging. By then, you will have to decide whether to upgrade or buy a new one (which would then cost you another thousand dollars). Of course, you’d also have to do regular maintenance on it to make it last longer which also costs money.
Related: Good Seed Trust Migrates 100% to the Cloud After Experiencing Server Issues
For cloud-based email, you will only be paying ~$5 per person. Plus, most of these provides offer a lot more than just email. For example, a Microsoft Office 365 account will also give you access to the office suites (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and 1 Tb of storage. Now that’s value for money.
6. Flexible Scalability
A cloud-based email also gives you flexibility, not just in terms of costs, but also your options as a business.
For example, you hire additional people during the holidays and cut back after it. This can easily be done with cloud-based email as you can add accounts easily, then once they leave, you can assign and transfer all their emails and files to another person.
7. Improved Security
You might think of having on-premise servers as being more secured than being hosted on the cloud. Unless you can invest in your own 24/7 security and backup recovery system (as discussed earlier), you won’t be able to match the level of security of the big cloud providers like Google and Microsoft.
Over to You
Migrating your emails to the cloud gives you a lot of flexibility in your business. It allows you to focus on the more important things, rather than spending it on administrative tasks.
Some believe that by 2028, 73% of all teams will have remote workers. If you aren’t ready or not preparing for it, it will be harder for you to attract and retain talent.
Migrating to the cloud isn’t only for big companies. It’s not only for those in the tech industry, too. The cloud is for everyone who wants to stay relevant amidst the changing market conditions today and tomorrow.
Are you ready to take advantage of cloud-based email?
