When you run your business in the cloud, everything works, your information is always available, and the cost is usually lower than housing your business data onsite. The best way to explain the cloud is with a story. Lets discuss how the cloud works for my fiend Pams e-mail.

Everything just works. Pams company was running their e-mail and SPAM filtering in-house. They were receiving more than 5,000 SPAM messages per day. I kid you not. This far outweighed the number of legitimate messages. They needed a separate server just to filter and store the SPAM messages. If they didnt have this additional box for SPAM filtering and storage, their e-mail server would have run out of storage space and stopped working.

I migrated them to a hosted Exchange provider in Texas with a 100% uptime Service Level Guarantee and 46 of the Fortune 100 as customers. Pam no longer has to think about SPAM filteringher company now enjoys enterprise-level SPAM filtering. Pam no longer has to think about storage spaceher company has infinite storage space. Pam no longer has to think about e-mail working if her building suffers a fire, flood, theft, or power outage. Her e-mail is in Texas.

The Exchange providers facility has high-security, redundant power and reliable HVAC equipment. They also have multiple high-speed Internet connections. If one of them happens to go down, another would take its place almost immediately. Pam no longer pays anybody hourly to keep e-mail working. Her company now pays a fixed monthly fee per mailbox. Everything just works for Pam.

Its available from anywhere. Hosted Exchange is a database that Pam and her staff can get to from anywhere with Internet access. She can be at her desk and use Microsoft Outlook to get her e-mail. She can power up her notebook computer from anywhere with Internet access, launch Microsoft Outlook, and get her e-mail. She can be at home, launch Internet Explorer, log into her mailbox and get her e-mail. She can also check her e-mail from her smartphone. It is always available. This applies to contact info. Suppose a customer calls Pam from his new cell phone and says, Pam, I have a new cell phone number. Please update your records with the number you see on the caller ID. Pam can make that change once.

This applies to calendar info too. Suppose a one-hour visit to a customers office ends up running four hours. Pam can update her calendar on her smartphone and type in some notes from the four-hour visit. When she returns to the office and launches Outlook, her calendar will reflect four hours at that customer, complete with the notes she typed into the smartphone.

The cost is usually less. Pams company has 15 mailboxes and uses Exchanges Public Folders. They pay less than $200 per month for their hosted Exchange with Public Folders. That annualizes to $2,400 per year. Had they purchase a new server and run Exchange in-house, they would have incurred a very long list of expenses, including:

• Capital cost of a new server
• Software and licensing cost for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Exchange Server, virus protection, and SPAM filtering (and at least 15 licenses for each)
• Tax and shipping on the new server hardware and software
• Consultant’s time writing specs and pricing
• Consultant’s time setting up the server, Exchange, virus protection, and SPAM filtering
• Consultant’s time updating all the above products
• Consultant’s time migrating their existing mailboxes from the old server to the new server
• Consultant’s time updating users MS Outlook to point to the new server

Pam’s five-year cost with an on-site server would be $17,500 before adding the electricity consumption and extra load on her air conditioner to keep the server room chilled. With the cloud solution, the five-year cost is only $12,000.