#BellBiz Twitter Chat Examines The Real Cost of Email

It’s kind of ironic, but it turns out that the Twitterverse is an amazing place to talk about email.

On Thursday, June 20th at 1PM EST, we held the latest #BellBiz Twitter chat on ‘The Real Cost of Email’.  It’s was an informative and engaging discussion about how vital email is to every organization, the pros and cons of running an email platform in house, and the trend to move towards cloud based solutions to reduce costs.

There were a lot of takeaways from the hour-long chat, including:

Email outages have enormous consequences. Not being connected to email, even for a day, can have significant business consequences. Most people had experienced an email outage on at least one platform and the frustration associated with the business loss from the outage was a common theme during the chat.

The IT admin to email ratio in Canada is becoming out of balance. Guest attendee David Senf – an analyst with IDC Canada – highlighted that email storage increases 50% each year but IT staff levels remains the same. Some suggested that the higher adoption of cloud-based email solutions may account for that, but others noted that good IT administrators are scarce, expensive and difficult to retain.

In business, social tools may not replace email anytime soon. Everyone recognizes that social tools are becoming a popular form of communication, especially among younger generations. However, many agreed that email will continue to be the #1 form of communication in the business world for a long time coming.

Spam continues to invade the inbox. According to IDC Canada, 90% of all email sent is spam – a fact that most participants didn’t know but weren’t surprised by. Many people use some form of anti-spam solutions to tackle the problem, and some of the attendees mentioned that they receive spam from friends who routinely suffer from email security breaches.

Cost is the #1 reason firms switch email platforms. Organizations save money in costs related to security, software and storage by switching their email platforms.

As we wrapped up the chat, many of the participants expressed that they are considering or have already moved to cloud-based solutions to reduce IT costs, improve security and re-focus in-house resources.

We’d like to thank all of the participants for joining us, and we’ll be hosting another Twitter chat soon with another great topic to discuss. Stay tuned to the Bell Business Blog for an update on the details, or follow us on Twitter.