You're struggling to get all the work done in your IT department as it is. The usual cycle of patch management never ends; now it's time to test new versions of applications and updated OSs. You're working on reduced budgets, possibly with reduced staff. And, oh yeah, your company execs somehow want you to provide more functionality to users so everyone can be more productive.

This situation isn't unique to the IT department; in a down economy, every business division is dealing with similar pressures to do more with less. However, few departments have such a direct impact on all the others as the IT department. Naturally, something's got to give—and hopefully not your sanity. Outsourcing tasks to a service provider is an option that might save time, effort, and resources, and one area many businesses are currently examining for outsourcing is messaging. Let's take a look at what hosted messaging—specifically, hosted Microsoft Exchange—offers, and what you can expect to find if you're considering outsourcing your messaging needs.

Is Hosted Exchange Ready for Your Business?
Email is the primary means of exchanging business communications both internally with employees and externally with clients and business partners. It's also your calendar and scheduler. It's how you stay connected when traveling or working remotely, either through web mail or mobile device support. It serves as a document exchanger and, in many cases, a massive filing cabinet for company memos, presentations, and other important documents. Maybe you've implemented unified communications (UC) through Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 so that Exchange also acts as your company PBX and voice mail system.

Exchange Server can be your company's complete communications hub. An immediate question, then, is can you retain all this functionality if you outsource your messaging infrastructure? A quick scan of the marketplace shows there are many hosting providers, including Microsoft itself, that offer Exchange as a hosted service. Some smaller providers don't include every feature of Exchange, particularly more advanced features such as UC. But there are plenty of providers that offer the full-featured Exchange package, so if that's what you need, you'll be able to find it. Vendors distinguish themselves by the additional services they provide.

Hosted providers offer service level agreements (SLAs) that spell out what sort of uptime the service guarantees as well as what penalty the provider will pay if it fails to meet its uptime commitment. Most large providers offer something in the range of 99.9 percent to 99.999 percent uptime; this number might vary depending on whether you subscribe to the provider's standard service or if you upgrade to a dedicated server option. 123Together.com began offering a 100 percent uptime guarantee for its dedicated Exchange hosting option two years ago; Apptix recently began offering a 100 percent uptime guarantee for its Apptix OnDemand hosted Exchange service. With the massive data centers that are possible and the improved high-availability story through continuous replication in Exchange 2007, I wouldn't be surprised to see more service providers begin offering a 100 percent uptime guarantee.

Basic security, antivirus, antispam, and some level of support or Help desk are usually included at no additional fee, and often you can pay extra for premium services in these areas. Most hosted services also give you the option to pay for extra services: email archiving; mobile device support, including Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone, and others; and fax support through email are common add-ons. Larger Exchange hosting services can provide SharePoint and Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as well.

Migration services are a big plus, if offered. As Danny Essner, director of marketing for Intermedia said, "I think one of the dirty secrets of hosted services in general, not just email but SaaS [Software as a Service] as a category, is SaaS is great when you're using a product for the first time. What happens when you've been using a legacy product for five, ten, fifteen years and you have all that legacy data that you want to carry forward to the hosted model? A lot of hosted providers don't handle migration very well." Intermedia has what it calls the Exchange Concierge team to help users manage migrations, and most of the top players in hosted Exchange now have some form of migration service, either offered free or at an additional charge.

As you take a look at the variety of services offered by Exchange hosters, it should be clear how much you can potentially eliminate from your inhouse infrastructure with a hosted solution. The provider has high availability covered for you, which can save you significantly on hardware and other resources. If you take advantage of something like email archiving, you get storage in the cloud and reduced headaches related to email quotas and e-discovery requests. Each feature you outsource frees up something—or someone—inhouse to be redirected at another task.

And you get all this with predictable monthly costs—which is a key point made by Kirk Averett, director of product for Rackspace. "CFOs like predictable costs. And when you're hosting email inhouse, it feels very unpredictable," Averett said. "The hardware can die at any time. You have to go spend 5 or 10 or 20 grand to replace something. Or the software will become broken or incompatible with the backups—you just don't know what's going to happen that will change your costs." Planning your budget, certainly, becomes easier when you host your messaging.

Is Your Business Ready for Hosted Exchange?
Another important question to ask as you look at the hosted Exchange market is if you and your organization are ready to give up some control of your messaging infrastructure. If you go the hosted route to Exchange, it's not like you can sign a contract and then forget all about your email system; no matter what options you choose, there still needs to be IT oversight of the hosted implementation. Sure, you're ceding a certain amount of control to your hosting partner for security, message hygiene, availability. But even with inhouse Exchange, can you say that your security never has a lapse, that spam never gets through, or that unforeseen problems don't cause downtime?

Speaking to this point, Dave R. Taylor, cofounder and chief marketing officer of IT and business solutions provider Sparxent, said, "One of the reasons people stay [with on-premises Exchange installations] is, they'll call it security, they'll call it whatever they want, but really it's familiarity, it's comfort. 'It's the way we've been doing it, this is the way we're going to keep doing it.'" Security typically is the stated sticking point for organizations that say they need to maintain their own messaging systems. With data-protection regulations, this might be a legitimate reason in some cases.

Most organizations don't have dedicated messaging specialists; managing Exchange is just one of the many tasks on your IT platter. Hosted providers, meanwhile, have the resources for dedicated Exchange specialists, dedicated security specialists, and any number of other specialists to troubleshoot problems before clients are ever affected by them. As vice president of product for Apptix, Rick Rumbarger, said, "A small enterprise really can't have a dedicated security person. So I would suggest not that we're doing a good enough job [with security], but that we actually do a much superior job than what they can ever afford to do because, again, we have people that live and breathe email—that's what they do all day long."

A good indication of a hosted provider's commitment to security is whether the service is SAS 70 Type II certified. SAS 70 is an independent assessment of a service organization that looks at the company's internal controls. This designation has become more important because of legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and Gramm-Leach-Blighley Act (GLBA), which require the level of auditing that SAS 70 Type II checks for. Yet you'll find that not all Exchange providers have attained this certification.