For any business groaning at the thought of shelling out thousands for server, email, security and invoicing software, today's news of a rent-not-buy scheme from Telstra should be an interesting development.
Under the brand T-Suite, Telstra is offering rental plans for small business software that you run over the Internet. There's the usual bits and pieces like invoicing, customer management and HR, but the bits that stand out to us are:
- Backup - for a 12 month subscription, paid monthly, Telstra Remote Backup will secure from 2GB for $14 per month. (prices go up to $76 for 30GB)
- Email - for $16.95 per user, Telstra will host a Microsoft Exchange Server, giving you corporate email, shared calendars you can use within your business, contact database, and a subdomain like yourcompany.t-suite.com.au. We've written about hosted email before, and it's promise. The key point is that you're not setting up your own server, or buying the software.
- Security - for $4 per month you get anti-virus for PC and server via McAfee Total Protection.
While the pricing comparison and long term analysis needs doing before we make any final verdicts on the cost savings, the big deal for tiny offices is not having to do all the legwork yourself.
As we've reported, this is especially handy when it comes to security. We've recently reviewed McAfee Total Protection as part of our Small Business Security Group Test, and why the hosted aspect makes it perfect if you don't have an IT department or don't have the time, or expertise to be setting up and fiddling with servers.
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