This morning I received an auto-response from a subscriber to a newsletter I publish for work. This person is without ANY email for 5 days while they wait for a replacement router that was damaged due to a lighting strike (Connecticut is on about the 30th day of severe late day thunderstorms). How can any business professional be without email for 5 days when clients and customers use email as a replacement for the telephone? Having access to email from any Internet connected computer is an immense benefit — and a reason I’m such a believer in GMAIL and Google Apps which while still subject to outages are in my opinion a much more reliable solution for small businesses than hosting their own email. And apparently others are noticing as well because just this morning CSC announced they expect to migrate millions of users to Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite which is Microsoft’s soon to be available entry into the clouds for Exchange and Sharepoint.

CSC To Resell Microsoft Cloud Services