E-mail is the lifeblood of your business communication system, but it’s also the most vulnerable to security breaches, phishing scams, spam and virus attacks. As communications solutions become more complex, it can be overwhelming to handle these security challenges alone. But outsourcing to an experienced e-mail Hosting Provider is an affordable, reliable and extremely secure solution.

Nearly 59 percent of email outages are caused by infrastructure or hardware failures according to Alan Radding, writing for TechTarget’s SearchDisasterRecovery. Some of the major causes of downtime are: misconfigured hardware, database corruption, connectivity issues, and natural disasters – hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like. With Hosted Microsoft Exchange, however, downtime risk can be drastically reduced and even eliminated, since your hosting provider’s team can often stop these problems before they start – or at least be better prepared for recovery in the event of a natural disaster!

What does that translate to in monetary form? Liz Staplefoote, from Rackspace, says, “Enterprise application failure can cost more than $160,000 per hour in lost productivity and missed opportunities.” But moving to a Hosted Exchange solution puts massive server resources and a team of messaging and collaboration experts at your fingertips, ready to monitor your system for potential risks, mitigate virus, spam, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, help troubleshoot issues around the clock and quickly fix issues if they arise.

“Saving your organization the cost of being down for an extended period, missing important patches or troubleshooting server glitches make Hosted Exchange an attractive alternative to juggling it all onsite,” she said.

Choosing to keep your Exchange deployment local instead of using a hosted solution also exposes your business to other significant security risks, including the very real chance of extended downtime.

When searching for a suitable hosted email provider, make sure that your chosen provider can address all your security concerns, as well as comprehensive anti-virus and anti-spyware solutions. You should also make sure that your provider offers zero-day protection from attacks, so that you remain on top of new and emerging threats.

In particular, the security implications associated with the management of e-mail storage, policy enforcement, auditing, archiving and data recovery are crucial, according to Matthew Johnston, writing here for Net Security.

“Managing large, active stores of information takes time and effort in order to avoid failures – failures that will impact the users and therefore the business, undoubtedly leading to lost productivity. For secure and effective storage management, organizations must take a proactive approach and invest wisely in a comprehensive solution,” Johnston said.

When considering a secure email storage management solution, Johnston said, a layered approach, combining both business processes and applications makes sense. When you outsource your email solution to a hosting provider, a team of engineers takes on the management, maintenance and the associated headaches for you, both at the server and user levels, Johnston said.

If you’re looking to eliminate threats from viruses, spam, spyware, trojans, phishing, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, the loss of sensitive data and theft of private information, it only makes sense to use an email hosting provider.

Sharon Florentine is a freelance writer who covers everything from holistic veterinary care to data center technology and occasionally blogs for email hosting provider Rackspace Hosting.