In-House Exchange vs Hosted Exchange – A Comparison Chart For Credit Unions
Back when I ran an IT department for a large Credit Union, I can remember participating in user groups and conferences and proudly wearing the label “in-house” Credit Union. Being “in-house” usually meant large data centers and decent size teams – but mostly, it meant having complete control over the IT assets. And it made sense when all you had was a core processor and a few file servers. Fast forward to today’s complex Credit Union IT environment where one solution (core, email, online banking, lending, collections – you name it!) can have 3-5 servers just to get the job done! Slowly we started right-sourcing – first, we chose a hosted online banking solution which was soon followed by managed firewall services. Many Credit Unions have followed the same progression into hosted/managed services and are currently considering email as the next critical application to outsource. Making that decision – in-house exchange vs hosted exchange – can be tough so we’ve compiled a comparison chart to help you through the decision process. Our sales engineer, Barry Lewis has researched this extensively and after reading it, you may want to put away that “in-house” badge for good!
Comparison:
|
Feature |
IN-HOUSE EXCHANGE |
|
| Pricing | Heavy Upfront Investment Traditional, on-premise solutions have heavy upfront costs, unpredictable expense spikes (often associated with annual software licenses), storage growth fees, server and equipment failures, and ongoing maintenance costs. |
Pay-As-You-Go, Monthly Pricing Predictable, monthly pricing. This makes budgeting easier and streamlines your cash flow, since you don’t have to worry about depreciation of expensive upfront capital expenses. |
| TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) | Capital Expense With on-premise messaging solutions, you need to budget for significant hardware and software capital expenses. Additional costs come in the form of spare parts, overtime for administrative staff (especially if you want 24–7–365 reliability) and other maintenance-related expenses. |
Operating Expense There are minimal initial upfront commitments for installation and no commitments for infrastructure, hardware or licensing, and ongoing IT costs are minimal, so the returns are immediate, which results in much faster payback periods. |
| Deployment Time | Months Because of the upfront capital investments, it usually takes several months to properly purchase, setup, and configure most on-premise solutions. |
Weeks Clients can deploy OGO’s Hosted Exchange in weeks, rather than months, because there is no hardware or software to install and provision. |
| Storage | Spiraling Storage Costs As your email volumes grow, generating more and more messages per day as well as larger email attachments, you need to continually add more server capacity. When your future growth is uncertain, this becomes even more challenging. |
Predictable Costs. OGO’s Hosted Exchange leverages the latest and greatest storage technology, shielding clients from the complexity of storage growth and management, while providing you with the best technologies possible as soon as they are available. |
| Enterprise Class Infrastructure | Not Practical for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses. The cost and complexity of implementing backup and recovery systems, local clustering and high availability, and offsite replication of archives to a disaster recovery site is overwhelming for many companies to handle internally. |
Table stakes for Multi-Tenant Environments. Hosted Exchange offer high availability to all of their clients and invest millions of dollars to build secure and reliable infrastructures. This includes server clusters and other forms of redundant hardware to ensure the OGO solution is always available. Plus, OGO’s Hosted Exchange clients benefit from geographically dispersed, SAS-70 II compliant data centers, full redundancy and 99.99% network availability. |
| IT Expertise | Lack of Messaging Expertise. Estimates suggest that IT labor makes up approximately two-thirds of messaging costs. Even a “simple” Exchange Server deployment is complicated, and with complexity comes cost. The first cost you are likely to encounter is training your administrative staff to design, deploy and maintain an effective Exchange Server environment. As expensive and time consuming as the training is, though, it quickly becomes obsolete. |
Messaging Experts. Hosted Exchange let you refocus your IT resources on more strategic initiatives to help grow your Credit Union, instead of merely maintaining the systems required to operate it. Ongoing Operations employs experienced and certified staff to maintain their systems. In light of our service level agreements (SLAs), this is a requirement. |
| Ongoing Maintenance | Regular Patching & Monitoring. With on-premise solutions, your IT department is responsible for all of the day-to-day tasks necessary to keep your servers, storage, software, backup systems and network up-and-running optimally 24–7–365. This includes security patches, system upgrades and performing regular backups. |
Offload the Headaches. You can offload the burden and complexity by relying upon your service provider and our SLAs (usually exceeding 99.9%) to optimize email uptime. In order to meet our stringent SLAs, Most providers (like OGO) have built-in redundancy and fail-over systems. |
| Client Service | It’s All YOU. When your email goes down, your IT department has to scramble to get it up-and-running ASAP, because it is mission critical. And if you do not have a disaster recovery or email continuity solution in place, it can often take hours to troubleshoot. Consequently, IT departments need to provide regular updates to users while at the same time investigating the root cause of outages. |
One Culprit to Blame. Since you have effectively shifted your IT burden and headaches to Ongoing Operations, we are on the hook to serve you. We offer clients expert support, provided by a dedicated Support Services team, at no additional cost. Let us do the worrying for you. |
| Upgrades | Disruptive and Unpredictable. Your in-house staff must manage the on-going maintenance of email system to ensure email is always up and running. With conventional software, it takes considerable planning and effort to upgrade to newer versions and manage upgrades. |
Transparent, Continuous Upgrades. When you turn to a hosted solution, you immediately have a fully equipped, top-of-the-line system that is continually updated and maintained. This saves you thousands of dollars in server hardware, software, upgrades and the expertise to run it all. |
| Scalability | The Costs are Already Invested. When your company grows, your infrastructure must grow even faster. Scaling an in-house Exchange environment requires planning and additional budget (to purchase more servers or software). The problem is worse if your company is downsizing, since you have already invested in and configured your system for a specified number of users. |
Easy to Add and Subtract Users. Since OGO has extensive hardware and software resources, we can scale smoothly and easily. Cloud hosting, in particular, is especially designed for scalability, since you only use and pay for the infrastructure resources you need. |
| Antivirus/Anti-Spam | Another Layer of Complexity. An increasingly important part of administering a messaging environment is providing a continuously updated advanced spam and virus solution to keep your email secure. |
Protection Already Built-in. Hosted Exchange offers an advanced level of spam and virus protection which eliminates unwanted email before it ever reaches your inbox. |
| Administration | Technical Expertise Required. With most on-premise environments, in-depth technical knowledge is required to setup new users and perform tasks like email routing and managing mailbox storage limits. |
Web-based Control. Hosted Exchange allow you to manage your entire hosted email environment, including permissions, storage, mailbox creation and more, with just a few clicks, using an intuitive control panel. |
| Disaster Recovery | How Long Can You Go without Email? Research suggests that most small and mid-sized enterprises experience more than 40 total hours of unplanned email downtime each year. And some estimates suggest that upwards of 40 percent of these outages last more than 24 hours. |
Access Your Email Anytime, Anywhere. Ongoing Operations is a disaster recovery company as well, and is better equipped to recover from an email outage. In fact, we have built-in continuity systems to ensure your data does not go down, even if one of our data centers is impacted by network issues, hardware malfunctions, or regional disasters. |
Hosted Exchange service will save your Credit Union money, be more secure, provide disaster recovery protection, maximum email up-time and allow the Credit Union to more effectively and efficiently use its IT resources.
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