Why choose Office 365 over an on-premises Exchange Server

Everything is in the cloud now, and that has a lot of benefits. If you are currently on the fence about whether you should jump to a software solution rather than an on-premises one for your email management there’s a lot to consider.

It can be scary to give up control of your private mail to another corporation, and some companies may be reluctant to commit to a subscription service. However, there are a lot of very good reasons to do so, and it’s almost always cheaper to use a cloud service than to host your own solutions.

In this article, we’re going to talk about the benefits of using Office 365 over an on-premises exchange. You’ll learn how it can save you money and the added benefits you’ll get for using the service which includes awesome tools that can improve your productivity.

Security is easier

While an on-site solution gives you more opportunities for customisation you should stop to ask yourself if that’s really worth the hassle of managing it yourself. When you use a cloud-based solution like Microsoft 365 all of your security concerns are taken care of.

Your IT department no longer needs to worry about performing updates because everything is handled seamlessly by Microsoft with no downtime for your office. There are also better options for user-level security as these applications include easy to use and familiar 2FA authentication to protect your accounts.

Managing a server room is a full-time job, and if you let somebody else handle that work for you then you won’t need nearly as big of a budget for your IT staff. This allows you to cut down on a costly department’s budget.

It’s more affordable

An in house solution sounds great until you realise exactly how much it will cost you to run it. First, you’ll need your own server equipment, and you’ll need a lot of experienced IT specialists to run it.

Don’t forget about the massive power bills required to run those machines and any service contracts you might need for them. Servers run hard and they run 24/7. That means tons of wear and tear on the hardware and constant power burn.

Don’t forget that technology also ages incredibly fast. If you were to host your own solution then you might be looking at replacing that expensive equipment every five years. There’s nothing to replace with a cloud solution which allows you to scratch that cost from your expense sheet.

It’s also much easier to budget a cloud solution because it’s considered opex rather than capex. This allows you to creatively shift your spending while accomplishing the same goal and preserving your cash flow with lower upfront costs.

You get even more useful software

Office 365 isn’t just about Outlook and Word. If you go this route then you’ll also get some very useful software which could help your business. This includes some excellent productivity tools that help you to communicate better and be more productive as a team.

The software bundle for Office 365 includes 1TB of storage with OneDrive, SharePoint for collaborating on projects, Flow for creating automated WorkFlows and Teams for helping your company’s employees to communicate better.

If you don’t already have solutions for some of these issues then subscribing to Office 365 can be a phenomenal deal. Purchasing these software packages from competing providers separately could cost you hundreds per month in subscription fees.

Plus, having a single software bundle for your employees to manage and learn makes things much easier and keeps them more organised. They can get access to their workflows, have video conferences, collaborate on documents and more without ever leaving Office 365.

Unlimited scalability

While an on-site solution might be limited in its capabilities if you use Office 365 there are no limits to how far you can scale your business solutions. Your system can now be as complicated or as simple as you need it to be.

Cloud solutions are extremely flexible, that’s part of what makes them so great. Depending on who actually needs to use this software at your organisation you can turn authorisations on and off with flexible licensing options.

Your users also have the ability to activate the software on their own computers if they work from home so that they can have all the tools they need available to them.

If you need to upgrade an on-premises exchange then you’ll be looking at massive costs in both hardware and software to do so. You’ll also need to pay an army of IT professionals to handle the upgrades and updating your server’s software isn’t cheap either.

It’s more reliable than a standalone server

All computer equipment breaks eventually. That’s just a fact of working with technology. If you don’t have a great server setup then this could end up being very bad for your business.

Even if you have people on staff to handle the emergency it’s likely that you’ll be facing some serious downtime that could slow you down. This could mean a lot of money lost when you’re not selling products to customers or acquiring new leads.

A cloud solution which is managed by a huge corporation like Microsoft doesn’t have downtime. They have so many servers that if one goes down it’s barely a blip on their radar. Their system will route that traffic to a new one and their customers won’t even know.

While you could try to build this kind of reliability for yourself the costs would be quite large, and you can get the same level of protection much cheaper by using a cloud-based product instead.

In closing, Office 365 offers excellent value to its subscribers, and it’s worth a look if wasting valuable time and resources managing servers just doesn’t sound like something your company wants to do.

It’s a particularly attractive option if you require the other software products that they offer with the subscription because it saves you from needing to purchase them separately from other providers.