* The hybrid approach for messaging management
In a time of reminiscing about the ‘good old days’ when gasoline was only $2.75 per gallon, many people are purchasing hybrid vehicles as a way to get more mileage out of every gallon of gas.
The situation is not really all that different in the messaging space. While most organizations manage messaging systems internally, a growing proportion of organizations are using a hybrid approach for messaging management – a combination of on-premise servers and appliances combined with managed or hosted services that provide specific types of functionality for which these providers are well suited. For example:
* One way to combat the rising flood of spam that has increased by more than 100% in less than a year is to use a hosted spam-filtering service. Using a service that will monitor incoming e-mail for spam, viruses and other threats using content filtering or reputation analysis can eliminate most of the spam entering your network, allowing your on-premise content filtering solutions to operate more efficiently on the reduced flow of messages entering your network, thereby postponing upgrades of the on-premise infrastructure.
* One approach toward managing a messaging infrastructure is to deploy your own messaging infrastructure behind your firewall, but let a managed service monitor your servers, apply upgrades and patches and take care of all the nitty-gritty details of messaging management for a flat fee per user per month.
* If you want to implement messaging archiving but are concerned about a third party hosting your data, you can use an on-premise appliance that will encrypt data behind your firewall and then send it securely to a provider’s data center.
Why consider a hosted or managed service at all for conventional or unified messaging? The primary reason is that it will free your IT staff from the burden of mundane tasks like managing antispam systems so that they can provide more value to your organization. For example, would you rather have an experienced IT staffer manage an antispam server or reduce your customers’ tech support wait times by integrating instant messaging into your call center? A hybrid approach might just improve your IT ‘mileage’ considerably.
