There are good reasons why the BlackBerry remains the most popular and widely used smartphone device for business. Although anywhere, anytime e-mail isn't the novelty it was when the BlackBerry was introduced 10 years ago, the device is entrenched in the business world and has become an icon of 21st century industry. This entrenchment has come with a few challenges, chief among them being the question of how to protect valuable corporate information. The solution to this lies in the approach taken for regular business e-mail.
Once businesses reach a certain point, they take ownership of their e-mail infrastructure. Having a Yahoo or Gmail address is fine for personal use, but businesses need more control than that, and not just for vanity domains. The ability to determine when and how backups are performed, instant access to account management tools, and concerns over security are just a few of the factors that motivate SMBs to either move e-mail operations in house, or outsource to a managed hosting provider. For many of the same reasons, it makes a lot of sense to take ownership of your business' BlackBerry hosting services.
BlackBerry maker RIM developed the BlackBerry Enterprise Server to allow businesses to integrate BlackBerry services with existing e-mail infrastructure. Feature packed, BES gives users instant, secure access to business e-mail, calendars, and many other business specific applications. Like with most good deals, there’s a catch. Per user licensing and the hardware and technical expertise needed to deploy and run BES makes it a costly proposition. As with business e-mail and web hosting, the smart solution is outsourcing.
By utilizing hosted BlackBerry services through a managed hosting provider, SMBs get the best of both worlds. They take advantage of a suite of powerful features that have direct and measurable impact on operational efficiency, and they do it at a fraction of the normal cost. There are numerous ancillary benefits as well, including 24/7/365 technical support staff, fully redundant datacenters, and up to the minute virus and hacker protection.
The combination of BlackBerry smartphones and BES is a tremendous edge for organizations of any size, and hosted BlackBerry services give businesses a cost effective solution that far exceeds the service levels they would be able to provide internally. Hosted BlackBerry services eliminate cost of entry obstacles and allow SMBs accelerated deployment into existing or new e-mail systems. Hosted BlackBerry services give businesses a competitive advantage in a marketplace where every advantage counts.
