Scalable Hosted Exchange

As consumer expectations for a timely and professional response to email rises, email volumes worldwide continue to increase as more small and medium businesses switch to mostly online correspondence. A survey of over 2000 UK consumers(1) commissioned by Fasthosts found that 37 per cent of consumers now already expect even the smallest firms to reply to online enquiries outside of regular office/shop hours. With this in mind, Fasthosts latest offering ensures fully synchronised hosted email, with the very latest features for accessing and responding to emails, tasks and appointments swiftly, both in a desktop and mobile environment.

The new Fasthosts Hosted Exchange 2013 solution builds upon Fasthosts previous popular version with new functionalities across important areas of use. Priced at £4.99/month+VAT per mailbox, users receive 25GB mailbox quota, a platform fully supported by Microsoft-certified experts and access a guaranteed 99.99% SLA. The latest Outlook 2013 software is also available through Fasthosts at only £1.49/month+VAT per user.

Latest features of Exchange 2013 enable businesses to promote better team-working with sharable contacts, calendars and tasks, synchronised mobile email, touch optimisation for tablets and smartphone devices, offline access to email messages, as well as excellent integration of other MS Office applications and a highly intuitive user-interface. For users sending and receiving large volumes of mail and attachments, a 50GB mailbox is also available, which includes Outlook 2013 in the £9.99 per mailbox price.

Further to the brand new platform, Fasthosts have introduced a more customer focussed buying process, enabling users to buy multiple mailboxes and in turn benefit from volume discounts and a wide choice of flexible contracts and payment options. In this way, businesses can save over 20% per mailbox, providing further control and cost savings for hosted email solutions.

An example of a SaaS solution, Fasthosts Exchange 2013 offers cloud benefits such as mobile working and scalable solutions. Users can scale their mailboxes up or down on a monthly basis with flexible contracts, allowing them to adapt their requirements to workload or organisational needs, and only pay for what they need. With increased scalability being just one of the benefits of such technological developments, improved agility helps businesses have tighter control over their IT expenditure.

Claire Lewis, Marketing Director, Fasthosts Internet said, "Research has shown us that many SMEs still use on-premise solutions that are costly and at risk to data loss. While most companies, and specifically business owners and managers, today realise the value of hosted business email, Fasthosts advises all types of business to examine how their daily use of email is developing in relation to their business needs. With hosted email, many UK firms could benefit from greater efficiency, enhanced email accessibility and handling, increased levels of security as well as cost savings."

All email data is stored in wholly owned geo-redundant data centres. Users benefit from anti-virus protection and a configurable spam filter to protect against threat vectors and unsolicited mail. Coupled with a 99.99% uptime guarantee, both security and resilience are placed at the heart of the Exchange 2013 solution.

Anthony Millar, IT Director of the CPL Training Group, and one of Fasthosts Inspiring Better Business case studies commented, "It's vital to our business that our IT solutions are robust and reliable. With Fasthosts we are 100% confident in the technology, service and support."