In today’s digital age, a professional online presence is vital for businesses to establish trust. Yet, the often neglected, but crucial component of this digital presence is the email address. While @bigpond.net.au or @gmail.com are convenient, relying on them for your business might be costing you more than a bit of trust. Let’s unpack why.
Perception of professionalism
Your email address provides a critical part of your business’s digital identity. While platforms like Gmail and Bigpond are reputable, utilising these extensions will sometimes project an impression of informality, impacting the perception of your business’s professionalism.
Using a branded email (e.g. info@yourbusinessname.com.au) assures customers of the legitimacy & established trust of your business.
Email back-ups
As business owners ourselves, we understand the importance of a secure email account, and therefore a significant amount of important information is contained within our account.
Generally, free email service providers like Gmail aren’t backed up, meaning that if you somehow lost access to the account, you have no way of salvaging that information.
Security concerns
Most of the communications that we send via email aren’t things that we would necessarily want broadcasted to the world. While most emails are encrypted during transmission, it’s important to note that free versions of these platforms don’t enable end-to-end encryption.
Without getting too technical, Gmail uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) to encrypt emails, but this will only work if the recipient’s email provider also supports TLS encryption.
Data Location
Given that many of the free email service providers are located internationally – do you know where your sensitive data is even being stored?
In Gmail’s case, Google has data centre locations all over the world. Notably none in Australia:
Image Source: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations
If you are a business or organisation that will be transmitting or storing sensitive information – for example healthcare or professional services – knowing and understanding where your email servers are located is imperative.
Lack of support
As these email service providers are often part of huge companies (e.g. hello Google!), the ability to get timely and local support when you need it can be a major problem.
How long do you think you could go without access to your business’s inbox?
1 hour? 1 day? 1 week? The answer is generally unknown as these software companies are so large and managed by so many different individuals that it is almost impossible to provide an average wait time for support.
Having your emails managed locally by a reputable company means that you can receive support when you need it, which in most business cases is worth the few extra dollars, considering your inbox will become both securely encrypted & backed up with easy but secure access.
Ok, so how do we fix the issue?
Transitioning from a generic email address to a branded email address is relatively straightforward, and something that the team at Calvert Technologies can assist with:
- Domain Registration – Firstly we make sure that you have a domain name that aligns with your business name or brand identity.
- Setup Email Hosting – We create a secure environment within an Australia based data centre to host your email and data.
- Setup Emails – We work with you to setup the email addresses that you need. Often, it’s not just yourname@businessname.com.au, you may also want admin@ or info@, and sometimes you want redirects put on these so they automatically go to another address.
- Configure Email Clients – We can help you and your team to setup the emails on your PCs, laptops, and smartphones so that you can send and receive with ease, no matter where you are.
- Backup – We put in place daily back-ups of your emails to ensure that recovery is easy in the case of a ransomware attack or even an unintentional internal error.
Need help?
If you’re ready to hand over the burden of IT in your business, our team is ready and here to help. We are one of South Australia’s leading managed service providers, supporting businesses of all shapes and sizes.
If you’d like to know more, please get in touch via our Contact page.
