Costs and Benefits of Moving email to the Cloud for Small Businesses

A very common misconception is that services in the cloud are free or at least cheaper than maintaining existing servers or in-house IT infrastructure for your small business.  Sure, you may be able to save yourself some money, but that is certainly not always the case.  There are non-monetary factors too.

Just like everything else, there is always a tradeoff.  As long as you accept the risks and understand what you are getting into, you should do fine.  Here is some information to consider that relates specifically to moving email to the cloud.  We put this together for the benefit of our NJ and NY small businesses customers that are considering moving this ever important service to the cloud.

• Of all the things that can be moved to the cloud, email is always the chief suspect.  The fact is that, email is a commodity service.  It’s almost free, and it some cases, it is!  But consider the following:
• Your employees live in their email all day long (at some at night!).
• Like it or not, for many employees, their email (typically Microsoft Outlook) is not only their primary means of communication or fulfilling customer orders, it is also their office filing cabinet, calendar, journal, to-do list and more.
• Changing this crucial business platform could have long lasting effects on the productivity of your company as employees deal with the changes of their new email platform.  For example, some of the functionality that your employees rely on in Microsoft Outlook could be missing from Google’s Gmail or Microsoft Office 365.  Here is a very detailed video that does a deep dive into the differences between Microsoft Exchange and Outlook versus Google Gmail.

The bottom line is this.  Change can be good, and it might save you some money, but you need to go in with your eyes wide open and consider how important email is to your small business.  Call us, we can help!

Daniel Haurey

Daniel Haurey Jr. is the president and founder of managed IT services provider Exigent Technologies, which he founded in 1997. Under his leadership, the MSP has earned accolades ranging from Channel Futures MSP 501 to being named SonicWall’s 2024 MSP Growth Partner of the Year. Dan is a true entrepreneur, dedicated to growing, investing in, and mentoring small businesses. You can find him on LinkedIn, where he regularly posts about technology, business, leadership, and community.