What is the difference between in-house email and outsourced email for a credit union?

Every credit union has its strengths and passions, and email can be one of those sticky subjects. At Ongoing Operations, we often see credit unions that love to host exchange – but they are doing it for reasons they cannot articulate well. Read on to learn about in-house and outsourced email.

In-house email is great for a few types of credit unions: namely, credit unions that have both significant exchange expertise and people whom they have strategically decided to dedicate to exchange. This subset of credit unions is not very large. Most of the time, we see credit unions that might have one person who has some exchange experience – but that person also has six other job duties, and is unable to stay on top of the latest trends and all that needs to happen with exchange.

We most commonly see credit unions outsource exchange to an entity like Ongoing Operations or Office 365. When someone comes to Ongoing Operations to outsource their email, one of the common complaints we hear is that the credit union staff does not have time to stay on top of their exchange updates. Our goal is to enable credit unions to spend their employees’ time on member-facing technology rather than on the nitty-gritty IT side that will never differentiate the credit union in its marketplace.

Another critical aspect of in-house v. outsourced exchange is the maintenance factor. In an outsourced environment like Ongoing Operations, we take care of all the continuous maintenance, security patching, and other front-end considerations that credit unions have to deal with, like spam, anti-virus, mdm, secure messaging, archiving etc. (when did email turn into 10 servers?)

In-house and outsourced email for Credit UnionsWhen a credit union keeps email in-house, it often ends up seeking multiple providers: a spam service provider here, data-leak protection there, someone to handle encrypted email somewhere else… Before they know it, the credit union has three different vendors involved in their email chain, all with different implementations, different pricing, different contract lengths, etc. Pretty soon, hosting your own email becomes a major hurdle from the perspective of vendor management and employee time. Credit unions must decide which is a better strategic differentiator: have critical IT staff spend time specializing in exchange and email hosting or spend those resources on solving key credit union business technology problems?

When considering the differences between outsourced and in-house exchange, your credit union has to decide strategically where you want to spend your resources from an IT human capital perspective. If you think you can make exchange a competitive differentiator, by all means, keep it in-house. Most credit unions will find that exchange cannot be a competitive differentiator. In that case, Ongoing Operations can take the heavy load of email hosting off the credit union and let the credit union focus on better serving its members.

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