{"id":945,"date":"2014-02-13T15:00:58","date_gmt":"2014-02-13T15:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/?p=945"},"modified":"2014-02-13T15:00:58","modified_gmt":"2014-02-13T15:00:58","slug":"will-your-small-business-email-be-hosted-or-in-the-cloud-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/will-your-small-business-email-be-hosted-or-in-the-cloud-this-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Will your small business email be in the cloud this year?"},"content":{"rendered":"
The move to hosted services reflects the growing adoption of cloud-based <\/a>services on the part of small and mid-sized business for a number of reasons, the Spiceworks survey points out. Most notably cloud-based email:<\/p>\n Reasons holding small and mid-sized businesses back from adoption of cloud-based email services were concerns over a lack of control and security and compliance issues.<\/p>\n What to know about moving email to the cloud<\/strong><\/p>\n In all cases, when moving any of your company operations to the cloud, ask potential vendors about:<\/p>\n Security:<\/strong> Security is not only critical in terms of running your business; many laws today require you to protect the personal information of your customers. Find out what precautions a provider takes to protect data from security breaches, including encryption and firewalls as well as onsite security and possible natural disasters. Does the vendor back up data at more than one location, for example? \u00a0Also ask how soon you can expect to be notified if there is a data breach.<\/p>\n Performance: <\/strong>Will the offering be able to scale as your business grows. You want to make sure the performance is at least equal or better than managing email on your own.<\/p>\n Availability:<\/strong>\u00a0 Downtime is something you can\u2019t afford. Ask about uptime guarantees; in fact, find out if you get money back if the service goes down.\u00a0 You also need to know who to contact if there is downtime or if you will be relegated to an automated call tree.<\/p>\n As TechTarget says, \u201cWhen it comes to cloud email migration, you need to do a lot more than just move mailboxes.\u201d\u00a0 Do your homework, run some trials and take your time in preparation and planning to ensure a successful move to the cloud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is your email on premise or hosted? Any plans to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[510],"tags":[587,680,1171,637,580],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Is your email on premise or hosted? Any plans to make a change this year? \u00a0In its \u201cCatching up to the Clouds\u201d<\/a> report issued last June, IT pro community Spiceworks noted that among small businesses \u201cemail is getting some new digs.\u201d \u00a0Among the 500 IT professionals from small and midsize businesses in North America and EMEA surveyed for the report, hosted email deployments grew to 46 percent in 2013 from 42 percent in 2012. Over the same period, on premise email deployments decreased to 49 percent from 52 percent.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>If you are among those small businesses that plan to move your on-premise email to the cloud, TechTarget provides suggestions<\/a> for evaluating providers. Here are some of them:<\/p>\n
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