Hosted Services seems to be a concept that is starting to come to the fore. Rather than purchase the software & hardware outright, you “rent” the service from someone else. In certain circumstances, particularly organizations with small to medium networks, it can be very cost effective.
Hosted services include technologies such as hosted anti-virus & anti-spam as well as hosted Microsoft Exchange (email & collaboration server).
A hosted exchange server, like SureExchange, gives all the collaboration functionality of an exchange server, & is particularly useful for people who travel.
A technology we’ve just started to trial at Microworx is Trend Micro Email Security Services. Rather than run a multi-thousand dollar security solution on your email gateway, you can rent the solution from a company that specializes in IT security. We’ve been using it for 2 weeks & have been very impressed! Spam has reduced from over 80 to about 5, with no false positives. Seventy five percent of our spam was removed by the real time blacklist technology that stops mail from the IP address of known spammers. All the headaches of filtering are dealt with before it even hits your network. For those clients that are looking for a top-shelf solution to dealing with their spam problems, this is certainly one to consider.