If you’re like most people, you probably check your email from several different devices, including your work computer, home computer and tablet or smartphone. When you do this, you’re taking advantage of Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), which stores incoming and outgoing email messages on a server, ensuring that what you see is the same on each device.
IMAP “competes” with POP3, another email protocol that allows you to have a copy of your email and attachments residing on your computer. Depending on program configuration, these messages may be automatically deleted from the server once they are received, or at some future time. Messages sent, moved or deleted from a computer using POP can only be viewed on that individual computer’s folders.
IMAP combines the best of traditional POP3 email – which downloads into your email program for easy reading – with the best of webmail, which is a handy way to access email when you’re away from the office.
IMAP has been around for several years, but has seen a huge increase over the last few years for several reasons:
Chances are, if you have a smartphone or tablet, you already have IMAP. When you add your email account information to these devices, IMAP should be an option.
IMAP is also very easy to set up. To start, simply go to the “Settings” section on your phone or tablet where you’ll be asked a series of questions based on your email provider. Many of the standard email platforms – such as Outlook, Gmail and iCloud – are partially preconfigured for you. In the series of questions asked during account setup, you’ll also be asked to specify your incoming mail server type. Click the arrow to scroll to IMAP. In most cases, that’s all you need to do. In other cases, you may need to quickly ask your email provider for instructions. Sometimes you may need to specify any special security options.
With its ease of use and flexibility for configuring mobile devices and tablets, IMAP is perfect for multi-device users. You may even wonder how you ever lived without it.
When talking about the cloud, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the proliferation of acronyms. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are three you'll likely see the most; according to recent analyst reports, all are growing at a rapid clip as cloud adoption rises. Gartner estimates that of the $131 billion cloud computing market, these three fundamental service models represent more than 20 percent of expenditures: PaaS comes in at about one percent, whereas SaaS sits at 14.7 percent of the market and IaaS at 5.5 percent.
In an IaaS model, businesses outsource the equipment they need to support their operations – including hardware, servers, storage and networking components – to a service provider who delivers and maintains this equipment. Businesses turn to IaaS solutions to avoid the capital expenditure outlay for equipment such as servers, and also because they can scale quickly and easily. If the scale of their operations fluctuates, or if they are looking to expand, they can tap into the cloud resource as needed rather than purchase, install and integrate hardware themselves. Meanwhile, the service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, servicing and upgrading it.
SaaS (also known as hosted applications) is a hosting model in which applications use a set of common code and are owned, delivered and managed remotely by a vendor or service provider, made available to customers over the Internet. SaaS allows organizations to access business software at a monthly or annual fee that is typically less than paying for the applications outright. It does not need to be installed, set up or maintained, as the software is hosted remotely. This means that businesses don't need to invest in additional hardware.
Sitting between the two is PaaS, which draws from both concepts. In a PaaS model, businesses rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones. With PaaS, operating system features can be changed and upgraded frequently, and geographically distributed development teams can work together on software development projects. PaaS helps cut costs because programming development efforts can be unified.
If PaaS sounds a lot like IaaS, there’s a good reason: They share a lot of the same characteristics and, according to some industry pundits, PaaS will likely be consumed by IaaS in the near future as IaaS vendors include PaaS capabilities within their offerings. PaaS is today's most ill-defined area of cloud computing, these industry experts argue, with approaches, features and definitions varying widely among providers. Most PaaS offerings provide only the features and functions that build and deploy applications, lacking access other resources and tools to support specific features, such as remote and native APIs, as well as middleware and database services. Still, other surveys indicate that PaaS is growing at a rate that may sustain its independence as a model of business.
PaaS has played an important role in the cloud thus far, but the market will soon decide if it's meant to stand alone or meld quietly into the IaaS landscape. In the unpredictable realm of information technology, contradictory forecasts are nothing new. We’ll simply have to wait and see where the market goes.
On April 8, Microsoft will no longer support Exchange 2003. The trusty decade-old email software is still used by more than 66 million people worldwide. With the impending deadline approaching many users will no doubt be asking, “Where do we go from here?”
Exchange 2003 is from the pre-cloud era, and business technology has changed dramatically since Exchange Server 2003 came out. The last couple versions of Exchange have brought more features and enhanced functionality, including S/MIME-based message security, Windows Server 2012 R2 support, OWA junk email reporting, and SSL offloading, just to name a few.
Since 2003, businesses have also experienced a culture shift regarding mobile device integration. Checking email on your smart device or tablet has become second nature to so many professionals as the devices have become more powerful and pervasive – Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies are necessary for most businesses. Users have new expectations from their email, calendar and messaging environments that Exchange 2003 simply can’t fulfill.
If you are among the remaining users of Exchange 2003, you have several options available to you to prepare for the upcoming abandonment of Exchange 2003 by Microsoft support.
1. Remain on Exchange 2003: This is by far the most risky option, with the software’s End of Life imminent. Microsoft will no longer issue security patches, which leaves you open to security and privacy threats. In addition, you’ll be missing out on innovations offered by the newer versions.
2. Upgrade to on-premise Exchange 2010 or 2013: Unfortunately, an on-premise upgrade of Exchange 2003 involves more than upgrading licenses and installing servers. A successful Exchange upgrade typically requires the services of specialized Exchange migration consultants, as well as significant IT time and budget. You’ll need to invest time and money in network topology upgrades, and potentially address the following as well:
3. Migrate to cloud-based Exchange 2010 or 2013: Companies can avoid the labor costs and capital investments of an on-premise upgrade by migrating to cloud-based Exchange. Choosing the right cloud provider will eliminate downtime risk, keep costs low and deliver a reliable, secure and integrated cloud environment.
For customers who have an existing on-premise Exchange 2003 platform, Hostway offers a free migration to a Cloud Exchange platform.
Making the move from Exchange 2003 to more recent versions of cloud-based Exchange is the safest, most cost-effective option. It’s perfect for companies who are looking for a secure, reliable email solution that is intuitive, familiar and simple.
Don’t fall behind – make the transition!
Small-business decision-makers know the importance of a free or inexpensive utility, and free email services are everywhere. Funding is finite, and other aspects of the company are always begging for increased resources.
So it’s easy to see why some small businesses are on Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and the like: Maybe they started out with a business address like “mybusinessname@gmail.com,” and remain reticent to move? Perhaps they are afraid that changing addresses could confuse customers? Or maybe they just don’t see the point in paying for any service you can get free?
Whatever the circumstances, there’s a strong business case to be made for company branded, domain-based email (like “yourname@yourbusinessname.com”) – a case that draws upon issues of credibility, marketing and security:
1. Be Memorable. A business email address should be as memorable and unique as possible. There’s not much unique about your gmail address, is there? When you’re on a widespread free email service or ISP, it’s also difficult for people to remember which one it is. Was that a Yahoo address or Hotmail?
2. Be Conventional. People have also come to expect the name of a company to be located directly after the “@” sign of an email address. When you’re on a free service, it looks unreliable; it gives the impression that your business isn’t really a business, but rather an individual looking to sell a product or service. That leads to speculation on just how much of a foundation a business has, how many bad business days it may be from folding, and so on.
3. Be Consistent. Your business, in most cases, already has a website; presumably, it also already has a domain. Matching your email addresses to your website helps people find you. You may even already be paying to have them: Most website hosting packages come with some number of email accounts that match your web domain.
4. Be Read. Without your unique domain name on your email address, the risk of being seen as junk mail or as a scam increases greatly. Think about it: When you get an email from what appears to be a personal email account – one that is unfamiliar – with a “special offer,” do you always open it? Do you ever open it?
5. Be Secure. Domain-based email correspondence, unambiguous and reassuring, carries the added risk mitigation benefit of giving you access to departing employees’ email when they quit – something lacking from free email solutions. Control is a huge component: Having your employees on company-based email gives you control over your mission-critical business data.
How do you want your company to be seen? How secure should your information be? If the answers to these questions seem crucial to the future of your business, then a domain-based email solution makes sense.
CIO online (www.cio.com) published an article about the top 10 use cases that are ready for the public cloud once privacy and security concerns are addressed. Their top 10 list was:
The premise of the article is that public clouds more than satisfy the privacy and security concerns for the above use cases. In addition, public clouds offer additional cost savings over private clouds or managed servers with the pay-as-you-go model and rapid scalability including the ability to spin up or down instances as needed. If your company is thinking about trying out the public cloud, consider testing it in one of the use cases above.
Hostway has also put together a whitepaper listing eight specific applications that are cloud ready. This list includes both public and private cloud-ready applications:
Because it’s not specific to public clouds, the Hostway whitepaper lists applications that may be better suited toward private clouds, depending on your requirements. For example, private clouds are great for DR and business continuity (BC) because of the ability to replicate data in near real-time. However, with Windows Server 2012 this functionality will soon be available in a public cloud environment through Hyper-V replication. Hostway is currently offering this service in beta and expects to launch in production later this year. This is particularly important when working with large databases as you simply cannot take the risk of being a day or week behind and losing data to a disaster. You need to be able to recover data that is five minutes old or in some instances as little as one minute old.
The two lists above are strikingly similar, indicating that there is agreement that the public cloud has enormous potential for businesses of any size. Moving non-mission-critical applications to public clouds has the advantage of saving on IT resources in several ways. For one, it frees up IT resources from mundane maintenance tasks and enables them to focus on more strategic initiatives. It also saves on capital expenditure – it eliminates the need to invest in expensive server and backend SAN and NAS devices, allowing you to spin up VMs when needed and then spin them back down when demand drops. And potentially the most important benefit is that you gain flexibility through the ability to tailor your resource utilization in real time and consume only what you need. This is a major advantage over your typical private cloud or dedicated server which has fixed costs that can’t easily be reduced even if your traffic goes down.
Hostway provides 24x7x365 support from highly trained professionals to assist customers with daily tasks, customization and issue resolution. These advantages are particularly important to the SMB business that often does not have the resources to hire highly trained IT professionals to run a separate IT division.
But what do you think? Do you think a public cloud is secure enough to handle your email? What about your Customer Relationship Management software? What applications do you think are public-cloud ready and which ones do you think need to be held in a private cloud or dedicated server? Do you agree with the lists above? What would you add? What would you subtract? What’s your position on public vs. private cloud?
Did you know that approximately 144.8 billion emails are sent daily across the globe? According to Mashable, the average knowledge worker spends 11.2 hours a week reading and answering emails, consuming about 28% of each workday. In the time it takes to read this sentence, 20 million emails were written. Needless to say, email is an integral part to the functioning of almost every business around the globe. But those stats just refer to the “typical” 8-5 workday – how many people really work those hours these days? In exchange for a more flexible schedule, many people have to be “on” around the clock, outside the office. They must be able to access their data from anyplace at anytime. Can your employees do this? With more and more workers demanding increased email accessibility, universal access is now less a luxury than a requirement.
Here at Hostway, we offer a solution for providing your employees access to their email anytime, anywhere. Hosted Exchange enables you to have Microsoft Exchange without the expense of investing in your own server farm to run it.
Choosing Hostway to provide your email communications offers five major benefits:
Act now and take advantage of two great offers: a free 30-day trial of Exchange and free Outlook software, the world’s most popular email and calendar management system. Don’t wait – call 877.798.6239 or click chat to speak to one of our representatives today!