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A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

Rediff.com

A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

Contents
On Premise Vs Hosted Mailing Solution 3
Hybrid Solution

How Rediff meets the Challenges

Competitive Comparison

Summary

11

Rediff.com

A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

On Premise Vs Hosted Mailing Solution

For many organizations, IT itself is not their core
competency let alone managing email services. Business
emails are their critical support mechanism. Most of the
times, organizations who has setup in house email
services underestimate emails full cost to their
organization. The cost of in house email is not just limited
to licensing and hardware cost. It includes costs of staff,
maintenance, storage, archiving, mobile email, etc.
Maintenance and support
To calculate actual cost of software licenses, one should
also include annual maintenance and support cost along
with installation charges. Software up gradation costs are
also significant and should be included in software
licensing costs.
Storage and archiving
With

mailboxes

size

increase

and

accumulation

of

attachments over the period, the cost of storage soar

rapidly. Along with this archiving, business continuity, eDiscovery, and regulatory compliance add significant cost
to email.
Staffing cost
For In house solution, you need have dedicated team to
manage the operations. Each of these tasks needs a skilled
resource who understands the mailing solution from end
to end.
Hardware cost
The hardware cost is not limited no of servers or routers.
The biggest contributor to hardware cost is the power and
data center cost.
Redundancy
In house email solutions are not scalable easily. To avoid
last minute hiccups administrators, configure all these
services in excess thus introducing redundancy in system.
Also for business continuity, IT administrator has to make
sure that they have redundant infrastructure in case
anything breaks up. If we consider all these costs for
managing in house email services, the actual cost of email
per user increases at least four times the cost of one email
license.

Rediff.com

A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

Benefits of hosted mailing solution

In hosted mailing solution, customer need not to worry
about the email infrastructure and its maintenance.
Scalability
You dont have to waste time in procuring licenses,
provisioning mailbox space or setting up email accounts.
Also hosted mailing solution can cope up with sudden
increase in inbound or outbound email traffic easily.
Always up to date
The hackers and spammers are continuously inventing new
techniques to invade into your mailing system. If your
mailing system is not upgraded with latest security patch
or upgrade, it can cause heavy damages to your business
critical information. Rediffmail Pro email solution is always
up to date with all the security updates and you dont have
to worry about security of your email data
IT resource management
When Rediffmail Pro is managing your email solution, you
can allocate valuable IT professionals to more businesscentric projects. The opportunity cost of running email onpremise is that your staff must spend time on email
support, rather than revenue generating projects is quite
significant.
Secure email service
The reason for which most of the organizations opt for in
house email solution is that they are worried about their
data security and control over hosted email service. With
Rediffmail Pro, the data is transmitted using secure
channel and moreover it is stored at a secured premise.
Also you can control unauthorized email data transmission
by defining user level restrictions and policies for their
email usage.
Access to open technology
In house mailing solutions binds you to proprietary
technology and protocols. The in house mailing solution
integration with different devices or software comes with
huge licensing cost. Hosted email services bring in value
by integrating with free clients and applications. With open
technologies, you could use any Android based phone/ d/
tab, iPhone, iPad, to get seamless access to email, calendar
and address book, while on the move.

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A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

Hybrid solution
Hybrid solution combines best of both on-premise as well
as cloud mailing solution. You can host few users on onpremise using Microsoft Exchange or lotus notes and
rest

all

of

the

users

on

Rediffmail

Pro

platform.

Organizations can optimize the cost and at the same time

do not compromise on data security policies by opting
hybrid email solution. Typically in an organization, top
executives would require email solution with advanced
features like access to emails, contacts and calendar on
mobile devices while other users would just need a basic
email facility.
Pay for what you use
In on-premise email solution, many feature and services
are bundled together. Most of users require only the basic
email functionality. By configuring on-promise for all the
users on domain, IT manager ends up in paying for the
features or services which are not used by most of the
users. In such cases, hybrid solution is best alternative. IT
manager can configure only power users who require
advanced functionality on on-premise solution while most
of the users can be hosted on cloud mailing solution.
Ancillary services
On-premises systems could be used for the primary email
system, but a cloud-based email continuity/disaster
recovery system could be used to maintain availability
during outages of the primary system. Also cloud email
service can used for spam/virus filtering and archiving
before the mails are forwarded to on premise mailing
servers.
Phased migration
The organizations which have on-premise email solution
would have already invested in email infrastructure, and its
criticality makes them shy away from rocking the boat.
Most organizations has play safe approach where if it
aint broke, dont fix it attitude takes precedence
especially when a disruption to email can carry heavy
consequences. In such cases, hybrid solution offers a great
value where IT administrator can migrate to cloud mailing
solution in a phased approach. This helps to ensure that
the disruptions are minimal and the transition is smooth.

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A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

How Rediff Meets the Challenges

The Rediffmail Pro email platform was built by Rediff.com
from scratch thus we have complete know-how of our
entire email architecture. We have been part of many
government and technical committees which defines
policies regarding email transmission in India.
Robust infrastructure
The Rediff hosted Email Service is built with the goal of
providing reliable email and messaging services all hosted
within a secure datacenter. Our robust and redundant
network infrastructure helps us to deliver mails with
minimum latency and ensure up time up to 99.9%.
SPAM control
Messaging anti abuse working group (MAAWG), Rediff.com
is a representative of MAAWG from India and has
contributed to address issues relating to SPAM originating
from India. Our multi-layered SPAM filtering mechanisms
helps us to filter out up to 99.9% of SPAM messages and
known viruses trying to reach users inbox.
Enterprise grade admin control
You can take complete control of email transactions on
your domain. The features such as bulk user management,
password security policies, mailing to list with controls,
branding, global address book sync on outlook 2007 and
2010, etc.
Mail on mobile
With Rediffmail Pro mobile application which works on
most phones, you are able to read your mails, view
attachments etc. Your actions on the mobile, like replying
to a mail, will also be reflected on your PC. Moreover using
this application you can get new mail notification on your
mobile.
Hassle free Data migration
If you are worried about your existing data, we have data
migration tools to migrate all your existing data to
RediffmailPro platform without any data loss.
Customer support
Our team of expert customer support executives email and
phone based support to our customers. Predefined SLAs
with escalation matrix helps the speedy resolution of
customer queries.

Rediff.com

A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

Rediff hybrid solution

Rediff offers different approaches for implementing hybrid
solution. The key for implementing hybrid solution is to
segment the user based on their email usage and feature
requirements. Once such segments are identified,
administrator can then host users in particular segment
on-premise and rest on cloud email solution.

On premise solution as a gateway

In this approach the MX record of domain (mycompany.in)
points to on-premise mailing servers. Thus all the mails
are first received at on-premise mailing servers. On
premise mailing servers then relay all the mails intended
for users on RediffmailPro platform to specific url. The
detailed steps are explained below:
IT manager configures 100 users on on-premise mailing
solution (ceo@mycompany.in, cfo@mycompany.in )
IT manager configures rest 900 users on Rediffmail Pro
platform on primary domain itself.
(sales_agent@mycompany.in, helpdesk@mycompany.in )
The MX of primary domain points to on-premise mailing
servers.
On-premise mailing solution relays mails intended for 900
users

on

Rediffmail

Pro

platform

to

mail.rediffmailpro.com
For outgoing mails, 100 users on on-premise mailing
solution use their own SMTP setting and 900 users on
Rediffmail Pro platform use SMTP settings of Rediffmail Pro
mailing solution.

Rediff.com

A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

Rediffmail Pro as a gateway

When the MX records of primary domain are pointed to
on-premise servers, all the mails received on the domain
are first delivered to on-premise mailing servers. Thus
organization needs to scale up on-premise servers
appropriately to serve additional load. Also up-to-date
anti-virus and anti-spam solutions should be deployed on
on-premise servers to stop unwanted mails. In Rediffmail
Pro as a gateway approach, the MX of primary domain
(mycompany.in) points to Rediffmail Pro servers. Thus all
the mails are first received at Rediffmail Pro servers.
Rediffmail Pro servers then relay the mails which are
intended for users on on-premise solution. The detailed
steps to configure hybrid setup using Rediffmail Pro
servers as gateway are explained below
IT manager configures 100 users on on-premise mailing
solution (ceo@mycompany.in, cfo@mycompany.in)
IT manager configures rest 900 users on Rediffmail Pro
platform

on

primary

domain

itself

(sales_agent@mycompany.in, helpdesk@mycomany.in)
The MX of primary domain points to Rediffmail Pro servers
i.e. mail.rediffmailpro.com.
Rediffmail Pro servers relays mails intended for 100 users
on on-premise mailing solution to server IP specified by IT
manager.
For outgoing mails, 100 users on on-premise mailing
solution use their own SMTP setting and 900 users on
Rediffmail Pro platform use SMTP settings of Rediffmail Pro
mailing solution.

Rediff.com

A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

Competitive Comparison
Comparison Features

Rediffmail Pro

Google Apps

Office 365

Core Competency

Email is the Legacy

One of the

One of the

Business

businesses

businesses

Data Security

IDC Based in
Mumbai , India

Data is hosted
outside India

Data is hosted
outside India

Customer Approach

Direct from
Rediff.com and

Through reseller
only

Through Reseller
only

Personalised,

Email, FAQ,

Email, FAQ,

telephonic, online

Support through

Support through

support,

Reseller

Reseller

through Reseller
Tech Support

documentation.
Customize Mailbox Quota

Available

Not Available

Not Available

Reliability

Upto 99.9% uptime

Upto 99.9%

Upto 99.9%

Bandwidth & data transfer

Unlimited

Unlimited
Unlimited

Virus protection

Available-Integrated

Available

Available

Spam protection

Available

Available

Available

FTP Access

Available

5gb per user

Available ( Extra )

Admin interface

Available

Available

Available

User Management

Available

Available

Available

Domain management

Available

Not available

Not Available

Custom Branding

Available

on Google page

Not Available

Bulk Tasks (Add / Delete /

Available

Available

Edit Bulk User )

Available

MIS

Available

Available

Newsletter ( One Click

Available

Not Available

Send mail to everyone in

domain )

Available
Not Available

Mail Alias

Available

Available

Available

Catch All Mails

Available

Available

Available

Group Mail id's

Available

Available

Available

Available Integrated

Available Extra

Available (Extra)

Available

Available

Mail Archival, Mail Backup

Global Address Book

Available
Attachment Management

Available

Available

Available

POP,IMAP,SMTP,HTTP

Available

Available

Available

Rediff.com

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A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

Access/Mail migration

Available

Attachment size

25MB

25MB

25MB

Email routing controls for

Available - Mail

Available

dual delivery

forwarding

Policy management &

Available

Available

Available

Mobile access via App

Rediffmail NG

Not Available

Not Available

Calendar Sync

Available

Available

Available

Digital Signature

Available

Not Available

Not Available

Maintenance & upgrades

Included Standard

No info available

No info available

Block unwanted e-mails

Available

Not Available

Available

message recovery

sent by users.
Enterprise Mail

Not Available
INR Pricing Model

Dollar Pricing

Dollar Pricing

Model

Model

Rediff.com

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A Competitive Mailing Platform Rediff.com White Paper

Summary
The key for any organization is to migrate to the cloud
where it makes sense to do so such as for security or
archiving applications and to support cloud-based
solutions with on-premises infrastructure, such as critical
email-enabled applications or those that must remain inhouse for compliance reasons. Deciding on the balance
between
on-premises
solutions
and
cloud-based
alternatives will hinge on the three goals of a) mitigating
risk, b) driving down the cost of email and c) maintaining
24x7 reliability.

Sponsor of this white paper

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