Ever since the first mainframes became commercially available, companies have had to invest in technology in an ever increasing amount. The investment is time, space, resources and money. Servers take up space, need electricity to run, networks to communicate and people to look after them. Business soon got used to this regular expense as the cost of doing business in the evolving, technological world. They never liked it, and always seem to regard their IT as an expense they would rather do without, but they know they have no choice. Or do they? Hosted email archiving is a new kid on the block, one that's gaining popularity fast.

We know that Exchange cannot handle the demands of email archiving on its own and neither can the other mail servers. The amount of data produced by the average medium-sized company in a year is staggering, and something that presents a constant headache for the IT teams. Storage, while getting larger and cheaper is a constant drain on resources. A hard drive needs a server or system to host it, which needs an IT room to live in and support to keep running. The hardware itself might be reasonably cheap, but the infrastructure needed to integrate it and put it to use it is not.

Hosted email archiving uses cloud computing to provide services to companies that are just like they receive already. The difference is that the company no longer has to have the It infrastructure to run it. SaaS has turned the traditional IT infrastructure on its head and provides a viable alternative to organizations of all shapes and sizes. Suddenly, hosted email archiving makes a whole lot of sense. The vendor has to take care of the hardware, the It infrastructure and everything that comes with it. The company only has to have basic systems and a network to connect to the vendor. The company then only needs to pay for what it uses, usually on a per-seat basis. This especially benefits smaller businesses who previously had to invest a lot for little benefit. No longer do they have to buy servers to provide systems for a few employees and spend money on hardware they hardly use. Now they can pay someone else to take the trouble, and access their systems. Only paying for those few users, which works out significantly cheaper. Smaller or younger businesses need all the help they can get to survive in these harsh times. The hosted model is an excellent way of using resources in a way that gets the most return from them.

Hosted email archiving can be scaled to work with almost any organization. Even huge companies could benefit from this kind of model. No more data centers, no more continual expense of support teams, no more outages and no more downtime. The hosted model is designed to provide maximum uptime by using redundant servers that can take over immediately one fails. In essence, businesses have let go of the reins and are now paying someone else to worry about IT.