People expect their mail, calendar and contacts to be synced on every device—in 2017, users have an average of 1.72 devices, either phones or tablets, per person1.
Older on-premises email server software—especially Exchange 2003 and 2007—struggle to make this happen.
They’ve learned how to sneak malicious emails through basic email protection. 80% of business users failed to spot at least one phishing email in a recent quiz2. And 63% of confirmed data breaches involved leveraging weak, default or stolen passwords3.
In other words: the spam and viruses that are stopped by the old standard’s software are a quaint problem, compared to today’s email-borne threats.
The proliferation of mobile devices has actually made email far more important to business. In 2016, the number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day totaled over 215.3 billion4, and 45% of those emails contain real business value5.
In the old standard, email was a communications tool. Today it is THE communications tool. The old standard simply no longer cuts it.
The average Exchange mailbox has grown 66% since 20116 —showing no signs of stopping.
If you’re running an on-premises server, you need to worry about your physical capacity to store all this data. But as any Exchange administrator will tell you, adding new storage is a lot more challenging than just swapping out a new hard drive…
Your employees close their laptops, drive home, and open their laptops again. As far as email is concerned, your business is open 24/7.
With the old standard, few companies could afford overnight or weekend support to help them if the server goes out—much less find qualified IT people to do the job.
In the old days, a Thursday evening server outage could wait for the IT person to fix on Friday morning, because nobody needed overnight access. Can you imagine losing 15 hours of email access in today’s business environment?
On an average, the cost of data loss to business was $900,000 in 20167 —and the cost of such outages will only continue to rise.
What if there’s a break-in and your backup drive is stolen? What if there’s a fire and your complete email infrastructure is wiped out? What if your backup gets corrupted, and you only find out when your main storage array fails?
These are all real-world scenarios, on average companies lost 2.36TB of data in 20168. With email being as critical as it is, on-site backup doesn’t provide the redundancy you need to assure business continuity.
This might be the scariest data point of all. 81% of US businesses had at least one legal dispute brought against them in 20169 — but these days, most courts only accept email as evidence if it’s kept in a tamper-proof archive.
Unfortunately, that tape backup whirring away in your closet doesn’t usually rise to meet this bar. Which could cost your company big in court.
It’s clear. While the technology behind email hasn’t changed much in the last decade, the ecosystem and infrastructure required by businesses to leverage email safely and completely has evolved dramatically.
There’s a new standard for business email. And let’s underscore the word “standard”: it means that at a minimum your business needs to have every single one of these elements.
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