Determining Cloud Solutions Costs

Determining Cloud Solutions Costs

Cloud solutions have been a life saver for many smaller companies wanting to save money on overall IT infrastructure costs.  The ability to host Exchange email and collaboration services off-site with maintenance provided for a low monthly fee is a great way to increase functionality and reduce costs.

But, can your IT company do the math? The low introductory rates of 10-25 dollars per month per user for hosted Exchange services sounds too good to be true, and in some cases it might be!  The low introductory rates are often associated with small inbox sizes, usually less than one gigabyte.  For instance, if your company has been in business for over five years and if you have never cleaned out your inbox, you could easily have an Exchange mailbox size of over 15 gigabytes.  This is 15 times larger than the introductory rate.  A hosted Exchange user mailbox with 15 gigabytes in size can range in price from 50-500 dollars per month depending on your choice of email providers.

So let’s check the math.

The Offer

Five users at the introductory rate of fifteen dollars per month per hosted Exchange mailbox.  This assumes all users have a mailbox that is less than one gigabyte in size.

5×15 = 75 dollars per month or 900 dollars per year.

The Reality

Five users at the rate of seventy-five dollars per month per hosted Exchange mailbox.  Users have mailboxes that are over 10 gigabytes in size.

5X75 = 375 dollars per month or 4500 per year.

There could be extra costs associated with overages.  For instance, if you buy the 75 dollar plan and a user goes over 10 gigabytes of data, you might be charged as much as 125 dollars per month per user for any overages.

Your Exchange cloud provider can also recommend strategies for archiving your email; however, if you ever need to reference older email, you would need access to the computer where the archive is stored.  This can be very inconvenient.

There are other factors involved including Internet provider charges, server costs, and maintenance plans.  These would all need to be calculated before making the decision to place Exchange services in the Cloud.

Let Loquient Tech Source help you decide which Cloud provider and strategy best meet your needs.  We can eliminate any potential for costly overage fees or Cloud strategies that would cost more than implementing systems locally.