Managed hosting provider, PEER 1 Hosting, announced a relationship with Microsoft to offer customers what it called fully featured, enterprise-level email services.

The firm noted that the hosted offering means SMBs can collaborate without them having to invest in mail servers, software licenses, security, or be involved with ongoing system administration.

Users can share and access calendars, tasks, contacts, public folders, groups and global address books as well as synchronise from their desktop, mobile device, and the Web. The packages start from £7.50 per mailbox per month.

Each mailbox will have three Gigabytes of storage, which will be pooled space on a per customer basis. Users will be safeguarded through McAfee SaaS Email Protection which works outside the network to block more than 99 percent of spam, viruses, worms and harmful content. Customers’ email data will be protected with multiple daily backups and a 14 day free-of-charge file recovery capability, PEER 1 said.

Dominic Monkhouse UK Managing Director at PEER 1 Hosting said, "Customers want an easy and cost-efficient way of managing their IT infrastructure, inclusive of email services. With our business class email packages, customers no longer need to provide or manage their own mail servers, backups, licensing or security."

In a recent interview with CBR, PEER 1’s CEO Fabio Banducci said the firm has 16 data centres around the world including one here in the UK. It makes around 80% of its revenue from hosting, and the rest from various network services. Banducci said customers can ask that their data remains on these shores in order to comply with any data protection or other compliance and regulatory requirements.