The email system you run for your business is very important. It’s a communication conduit with your clients and employees, a core business tool which should be unrivaled. Older email system, such as POP email systems may not be keeping up with the current cyber environment. It may be time to consider switching to Office365, especially if this email system is at the core of your business and here’s why!
Space Constraints
POP email is normally hosted on the same server as your website, those servers have space constraints and can limit the size of your mailbox. Currently, the number of documents received via attachments is going up you need more space to hold all those emails. More email communications per day means more space is needed to store them. You must maintain your own inbox deleting and reorganising, it takes time. Office365 Exchange services offer 50gig per mailbox by default.
Security
Starting with one of the most important factors in choosing a cloud service, security has been a stumbling block for many companies considering moving to the cloud. There are several security issues to consider with email systems:
Attachments
POP email supports attachments like all email, you can send/download them quickly and easily, but there is no security in place to strip incoming emails of malicious attachments. As POP is often hosted on the same server as your company’s website. If they’re targeting this kind of setup specifically, the simple act of receiving the dangerous email can infect your website itself, resulting in spam, altered content, or a broken website.
Worse still what if you or an employee downloads an attachment and it is a virus like Crypto Locker, now your business could be under threat.
Business often must deploy a single machine based third party virus scanner, while the work to a degree, the best option is to have a range of scanners at all levels Server/User for the best coverage, POP does have some scanners but they are not always up-to-date they must be constantly maintained and looked after. Office365 and Exchange servers have use antivirus software with multiple virus engines, it is like having ever piece of software on your computer at once. The antivirus signatures are kept up-to-date for you, and it uses Forefront Online Protection for Exchange to protect mail from malware.
Spam
We all have seen we get thousands email messages a day that are spam, we get added to some list somehow then you get swamped with spam.
POP email does have spam filtering technology called SMTP Reverse DNS lookup which checks out the sender to decide if the email is SPAM or not.
On Office365 your Reverse lookup is Microsoft, therefor you are less likely to be marked as spam. The modern-day spam filtering used on the Office365 Exchange service is combination of what is called a Black list, these are of Content and where it has come from. Microsoft constantly monitor the systems updating what is a threat and spam, as well as user feedback if you mark something as spam, that feedback is looked in to and added to the list of blocks at the server.
Reliability
Downtime is bane of businesses, after security, the next most common area of concern in cloud computing is reliability. Downtime means lost productivity and costs money. A single Dos (denial of service) or Ddos (distributed denial of service) attack on a Web server that has a POP server running as well, can bring that server down for hours or at worst case days, rendering your POP email useless.
Office365 services have multiple datacentres, all over the work designed to have redundancy in case of attack. If there is a problem at a datacentre, you are simply handed off to the next datacentre. Meaning you can always get your email from and Office365 Exchange server, with little or no service interruption.
Emails are backed up
Traditional POP and IMAP systems download email from your Email Service Provider directly onto your device, the email is then removed from your email server and as such only now exists on your device. Few people back up their PC’s or Laptops and as such risk losing all their emails if the device was ever stolen or destroyed.
Office 365 works differently, it provides your device with a copy of your mailbox that is stored on Office 365. If ever your device fails or is stolen you simply connect your new laptop or PC to your Office 365 account and all your emails will be back again…. exactly how you left them.
Multiple Devices?
POP email was designed in 1984, there was no such thing as smartphone, “portable” devices were not very portable at all. We now work and live in a time where everything at our figure tips. While POP with IMAP can work across multiple device it is far from seamless, a wrong setting on a client device, will mean that not every email is syncing down to every client. How about email address they won’t sync with a POP or an IMAP mail system.
Office365 Exchange will Sync Mail, Contacts, and Calendars. A single action like and add or delete will also add or delete that item from all devices. Adding new devices is simple also, Exchange is setup with a feature called “autodiscover” it allows new email clients to automatically detect and load the configuration from your mail, making setup quick and easy. As you may have experienced, POP email requires some technical knowledge to set up, such as which ports are in use, security types, and mail server addresses.
Other benefits such as clients can get a full copy of Office365, there is also SharePoint this allows collaborative work environments, where two people might be working on the same document at the same time. Office365 has far more benefits that just this.
Session Technology is a Microsoft Partner, we are not a re-seller of Microsoft products. Session Technology is a consultancy that works to find the best solution for your business.
