In their new report “Should Your E-mail Live In The Cloud? A Comparative Cost Analysis,” Forrester research does a cost analysis of self-hosted and off-site, cloud-based email services. The result?
“The overall conclusion is that any company with an employee count of under 15,000 would probably benefit from using off-site services.”
– Ars Technica
The two cloud-based services, Microsoft Exchange Online and Google Apps, were significantly less than all the self-hosted systems with Google Apps far and away the winner. In fact,Google Apps was significantly less costly than self-hosting for all size companies.
How much does your company spend on email? The report found that IT workers are largely unaware of the costs of running their own email systems. Many of those surveyed gave guesses from $2 to $11 per user, although a detailed accounting showed that the costs were often several times that (Forrester came up with $25.18 per month, compared with $8.47 for Google Apps).
Google Apps is awesome. Free (if you don’t mind ads) and cheap if you don’t want the ads. I’ve used it for a couple years now and love it. Would never want to use another email system again.