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1. Understanding Hybrids

Do you already have Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365 or Microsoft O365) in your business or are you considering it? If so, you need to read this!

We live in an era of hybrid everywhere – hybrid cars, hybrid plants, hybrid apps, and now hybrid email hosting solutions. The term hybrid refers to mixing two or more, typically to get optimal benefits. Read more about email hybrids here.

In this article, we will discuss how you can get significant cost savings from a hybrid of MailSafi email hosting and Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365). But before we do, let us first understand why business email hybrids are important, or you can skip right to the cost savings you stand to get.

2. So Why Have a Business Email Hybrid?

Businesses’ requirements for email and collaboration are not the same. Even staff within an organization do not all have the same requirements for email and/or collaboration. MailSafi Email comes in different (customizable) plans to cater to varying business and user requirements, making our plans extremely cost-effective.

Some businesses only need a reliable and secure email hosting service to communicate with colleagues, customers and/or other business associates. Others have staff who only communicate with their colleagues within the organization (internal communication).

In other businesses, some users need collaboration and advanced productivity tools to support their operations. This includes tools like video/audio conferencing, online chat, cloud storage to store their documents, access to email and documents on-the-go, and/or document co-editing.

Google Suite/Workspace and Microsoft 365 are no doubt great business email and collaboration solutions; however, most of their plans come bundled up with all these features. Although these are all great-to-have, most businesses soon discover that the majority of their staff only use a small fraction of these capabilities – primarily only email and to some extent cloud storage.

The primary objective of running a business is to make a profit. Making profit demands that you spend wisely and avoid spending (money) on what you do not need. Therefore, buying a one-size-fits-all email solution for your business is wasteful.

MailSafi is an email service provider working with businesses to assess staff use of their business email and collaboration tools. We help your business make the necessary adjustments to minimize costs without compromising on reliability and security. With our different business email plans, we help you group your users according to their specific needs, and you only pay for what each user needs. Cost savings are particularly significant and undeniable for businesses on Google or Microsoft plans.

The next section explains how this works.

3. Hybrid of MailSafi Email hosting + Microsoft 365

This is a combination of the power of the cloud where we integrate solutions by two email service providers, MailSafi email hosting + Microsoft 365. The power users can be hosted on Microsoft 365 while other users can be on MailSafi for email only.

3.1 How It Works

As shown above, userA@kachooks.com will communicate with users within the Microsoft O365 plan and communicate with userB@kachooks.com and other users in the MailSafi – and vice versa. The domain is shared between both platforms, and the communication is seamless, i.e., because of the shared domain, the segmentation is transparent to the users.

Now, let us first get a better understanding of the two individual cloud services from two different email service providers.

3.2 What is MailSafi Email & Collaboration?

MailSafi Email & Collaboration is designed to enhance communication for businesses by ensuring access to email on all devices, anywhere, anytime. In addition, with MailSafi email hosting, users can also synchronize their calendars and address books. They also get superior threat protection against viruses, malware, and other forms of spam. In short, MailSafi enables you to work on a secure email environment with increased reliability and uptime. Each user gets between 10 – 50 GB of storage space depending on the plan you choose.

There are three MailSafi plans for business email hosting.  These are MailSafi Basic, MailSafi Business, and MailSafi Enterprise.

MailSafi Basic is an email-only solution ideal for users with very low storage requirements – up to 10 GB. Our next plan, MailSafi Business, has all the features of MailSafi Basic but with up to 30 GB of storage. MailSafi Enterprise has all the MailSafi Business features plus collaboration features such as video/audio conferencing, online chat, online document storage, file synchronization, file sharing and co-authoring. It comes with up to 50 GB of storage. For more information, you can see the detailed features of all our plans here. Also, you can check out our blog for more about MailSafi collaboration features available in MailSafi Enterprise.

It is also possible to have a hybrid of MailSafi Enterprise and Microsoft Office 365 to save cost. However, in this article, we will focus on an example with MailSafi Business + Microsoft O365.

5.3 What is Microsoft 365?

This is Microsoft’s one-stop solution to boost productivity within an organization. Microsoft 365 has different plans to choose from. Microsoft 365 Business, Microsoft 365 Enterprise, and Microsoft 365 Standalone (Exchange Online Plans).

We advise businesses to choose either Microsoft 365 Business or Microsoft 365 Enterprise if they are specifically interested in Microsoft legacy applications (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and collaboration features such as Teams, Yammer, and SharePoint.

The Standalone Plan (Exchange Online) offers basic email capabilities/features but at a premium cost. Therefore, it is not a cost-effective alternative. Mailsafi Business has more or less the same features as the Exchange Online plan. However, MailSafi Business comes at a significantly lower cost.

5.4 Value Proposition of Hybrid of MailSafi + Microsoft 365

It is possible to have a hybrid of MailSafi and Microsoft 365 with any of our plans to save cost. A hybrid of MailSafi  + Microsoft 365 gets you the best of both worlds by letting you choose MailSafi for general users and Microsoft 365 Business/Enterprise for power users who need Microsoft legacy applications and more collaboration tools.

Other advantages of this hybrid are:

1. Best return on investment: There is clear justification of costs by aligning investment to user needs.
2. Seamless integration: You will be sharing the same domain name. This means the segmentation between the two groups remains transparent.
3. Seamless mail flow between the two groups of users.

The true allure of this hybrid is that if you are already using (or considering using) Microsoft 365 for your core team but would like to reduce your email cost without compromising on security and reliability, you can still keep the core group of power users on Microsoft 365 and have the other group of general users on MailSafi.

A hybrid of MailSafi + Microsoft 365 offers a very reasonable total cost of ownership – significant cost savings. By using a hybrid of MailSafi + Microsoft 365, you will optimize for cost without compromising on security and reliability.

5.5 Cost Comparison

The following table will offer a clear understanding of the cost-benefit this hybrid will bring to your organization. We will not address the Exchange Online Kiosk (which is around $2 per user per month) because it’s a more inferior plan compared to MailSafi Busines Basic and Exchange Online Plan 1. Exchange Online Kiosk lacks many basic email features and consequently, lacks in the value proposition. For this reason, we do not recommend it to most organizations.

Example:

To better understand the cost-saving,  let’s take an example of Kachooks.com, a local business with 400 users. They have had 50 of their power users on Microsoft 365 Basic and 350 General users on Exchange Online Plan 1. However, owing to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their business, they have been desperate to cut costs.

Table 1 below shows how much they have been spending.

Table 2 shows what they saved after moving to a hybrid of MailSafi Basic + Microsoft 365 Basic.

Kachooks.com hosted purely on Microsoft 365

Plan	No of users	Price per month	Annual cost
Microsoft 365 Basic	50	$6	$3,600
Exchange Online Plan 1	350	$4	$16,800
Total cost of ownership			$20,400

Kachooks.com hosted on a hybrid of MailSafi Business + Microsoft 365 Basic

Plan	No of users	Price per month	Annual cost
Microsoft 365 Basic	50	$6	$3,600
MailSafi Business	350	$2	$8,400
Total cost of ownership			$12,000

By moving to a hybrid of MailSafi Business + Microsoft 365 Basic, Kachooks.com saved an astounding $8,400 (41%) per year! These monies can now be channeled to other core business areas.

Would you like to SAVE BIG like Kachooks.com? Contact us today for more information or to get a quote on how much you stand to save with a hybrid solution.