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10 Ways to Cut your Email Costs

Understand the different ways Mimecast email management can save you time and money.

Need to cut the costs of your email management services?  Using Software-as-a-Service can be cheaper than running the equivalent software in-house, especially when one service replaces multiple software tools. But will it actually be cheaper for your business?  Check out how Mimecast could bring down your email management bills, step by step.

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1. Consolidate your email environment

   To get email management, archiving, e-discovery, continuity, policy management and full security coverage -spam, anti-virus and DLP - means running multiple tools in-house, and paying for the licenses and hardware for all of them.  Clustering these platforms for high availability adds additional cost and complexity. With Mimecast, you can eliminate all of these non-integrated point products and replace them with a single service that offers all these features.  The Mimecast service is designed as a single platform, as shown in the diagram below.

2. Reduce help desk queries

   Research shows that 20% of help desk queries are email related. The three most common tasks are releasing emails from quarantine; tracking email; and requests for recovering lost/deleted emails. Mimecast provides IT staff with forensic level auditing and real-time track & trace. Users can search their personal archive in seconds and don't have to call the help desk.  And because you can operate without a quarantine, the administrative burden of releasing emails is eliminated.

3. Eliminate technology gaps & overlaps

   Particularly for email security, you need to protect against a wide range of threats, but the range of tools and the number of vendors you may have to deal with means that you could end up having to choose between the risk of not being protected in one area or the waste of paying for two products with redundant features. Mimecast offers a full range of email security, all as part of the same service and for the same price, as shown below.

4. Save on staff costs

   Running multiple software tools doesn't just mean paying multiple software licenses.  It also means your IT team needs to install, update and administer all of them, using multiple tools - all with different interfaces, producing separate reports. Don't forget the constant training requirements, and finding multi-skilled IT staff is a costly recruitment activity.  As Mimecast is a service, there's no installation - you can connect your in-house MS Exchange system in a day.  Only minimal administration is required and Mimecast has a single interface for centrally applying policies and administering all features consistently across your sites and users. That adds up to much less work for your IT department, and means you can apply IT resources to solving real business problems and focusing on innovation that adds real business value.

5. Reduce ongoing costs

   On-premise software costs you far more than just the up-front purchase costs. You keep on paying: for the power and cooling the servers need; for redundant or replacement hardware if anything fails; for extra storage as email volume increases; for the time spent updating and patching the software; for support contracts and in-house helpdesk calls...with a service, you only pay one predictable cost per user.

6. No unexpected costs

   A predictable cost is always easier to budget for. With a service, you pay for the service and are supported by a service level agreement. That means you know exactly what the cost is going to be every month; there are no unexpected and unwelcome surprises because a server failed or your storage needs suddenly doubled or the IT team had to spend time rolling out patches to protect against newly disclosed vulnerabilities.

7. Cut the cost of downtime

   Running on-premise software means scheduling upgrades, which means scheduling email outages. It also means dealing with hardware failures, denial of service attacks and other problems that can cause unplanned outages. Now that so many workers are dependent on email, both cost the business dearly - and neither are problems with an SLA-backed Mimecast service.

8. Don't pay extra for performance

   At the busiest time of year - or the busiest time of the day - your email is likely to slow down as your email environment struggles to keep up with the load. An email service like Mimecast automatically scales to cope with the demand, so you still get email arriving promptly even at peak periods, without paying extra.

9. Pay for what you use

   If your business needs change, you won't get a refund on unused software or support licenses. With a service like Mimecast, you will be able to change the number of users you pay for, you can choose how long you need to archive messages for, and what level of support you need.

10. Immediate value

    Because Mimecast is a service, you don't have to order a server to run it on or schedule the time to install and integrate it. That means you can be up and running much more quickly, so you can realize savings and cost efficiencies more quickly. Not only do you get fast ROI, but your IT team is free to move onto other projects that add competitiveadvantage to the business when you need it rather than when they can fit it in.