Now, many enterprises of certain sizes are beginning to consider building their own corporate post offices. This choice is mostly based on the following conditions:
Enterprises have their own professional network management; they have their own servers; most enterprises have access to optical fiber broadband, but they only meet one or two of the conditions. Before this foundation is built, there is still a long way to go and a lot of work to do to build your own corporate email.
To build a self-owned enterprise post office, the construction phase includes the following investments: mail server, operating system, mail system software, database, virus firewall, anti-spam gateway, broadband access, and server hosting. It takes 1-3 months to complete these. There is still a lot of work to do to configure and debug the email system successfully.
It took a lot of hard work to build the mail server, and it required a dedicated network administrator to maintain it, and it also had to pay for software and hardware upgrades every year.
The quality of the corporate mailboxes you build yourself is incomparable with the corporate mailboxes of big brands such as NetEase corporate mailbox and 263 corporate mailbox. Most importantly, building a self-built post office involves high risks and heavy maintenance workload.
Hardware failure: Ordinary servers have single points of failure, whether it is CPU, memory, bus, controller, hard disk, network card, etc. If there is a problem in any part, a system failure will occur, which requires a lot of manpower investment. And cause service interruption (this is fatal for the mail system). Professional outsourced email service providers such as 21cn's enterprise email platform adopt a full-cluster, multi-layer, and fully redundant design with no single point of failure, so that they can provide stable services to each user.
Operating system failure: As the basic platform of an application system, the operating system also requires a lot of manpower to deal with. The operating system requires regular and continuous patches, including Windows systems and Linux systems. Users need to constantly pay attention to the update notices on the operating system website and constantly apply some patches to ensure that the system is more secure. There are two risks in patching. Firstly, once an announced patch is forgotten, it will open a hole in the system that everyone knows, allowing people to invade at any time. Secondly, the machine needs to be restarted when patching. It causes the interruption of mail service, which is detrimental to the mail system in the first place. Outsourced post office operators generally use multi-server cluster systems, which can patch servers one by one, effectively avoiding the disruption to the email system caused by patching and restarting.
Hosting environment failures: No matter how perfect a shared hosting environment is, it will suffer from some unexpected failures. These include network connectivity failures, power and air conditioning failures, traffic congestion failures caused by attacks on machines in the same group, and failures caused by DDOS and other similar attacks on the machine. The realization of any of the above-mentioned faults cannot be solved by the enterprise itself. It needs to coordinate with the trustee and even the telecommunications party to solve the problem. As a non-professional mail merchant, this coordination power is obvious.
Bandwidth environment failure: Similar to the hosting environment, enterprises have very weak control over bandwidth and are also limited by the bandwidth environment. If redundant bandwidth is used, enterprises will need to pay higher costs.
Through the above analysis, self-built post offices lag behind outsourced corporate post offices in terms of stability, security, and maintenance convenience, and are higher in construction and maintenance costs than outsourced corporate post offices. So we can draw a conclusion: building a self-built enterprise post office is not as good as outsourcing an enterprise post office. Of course, when companies choose corporate email, they still have to choose corporate email from big first-line brands, such as NetEase corporate email or 263 corporate email.
Author: Senior Marketing Consultant, Beijing Rulin Network Technology Co., Ltd. MSN [email protected]
Rulin Network - Internet marketing experts around enterprises www.rulin.net (Reprinting is welcome, please keep the source and author of the article consistent with this site www.rulin.net/blog)