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I am looking to move my small business off of POP email to something hosted. I have looked at Google Apps for Business and Office 365 but one crucial roadblock remains unanswered:

How can I restrict access to the services so that they are only available from within the office?

Just like how our current POP system works, I just want the employees to be able to access their email from within the office during work hours. Moving everything online opens the door to information leakage, and we can't have that.

I have found nothing for Office 365 and I have only found gControl for Google Apps, but it costs more per user than Google Apps itself. I also have no experience with SSO solutions (this is a really small business).

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    Why do you want a hosted solution if you want to limit access to your office during business hours? That's like saying you want a car, but one that can't drive anywhere. The whole point of 365 or Apps is that your employees can always access it (that's why it's called "365", for instance).
    – Bandrami
    Commented Dec 29, 2013 at 19:33
  • Valid point. The primary reason is because we've had more than enough workstation failures or virus infections that puts our data at risk and putting it in the cloud would at least provide us with some peace of mind.
    – raffi
    Commented Dec 29, 2013 at 19:40
  • So if I understand, you want a SaaS hosted email service, but don't want the emails to exist anywhere except the cloud, or your physical office ? How will you deal with the 'leakage' involved in send emails to non-employees? (Or is all email restricted to internal addresses?)
    – BrianAdkins
    Commented Dec 29, 2013 at 19:46
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    @raffi How do you calculate the price of gControl is more than Google Apps? gControl is $6/User/Year. That is Per YEAR. I can't imagine you pay less to Google? (which should be around $50/User/Year)
    – Rik
    Commented Dec 29, 2013 at 21:03
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    @Rik ... D'oh! That is totally my mistake. Somehow I read it as per month, not per year. That is a lot more reasonable. Thank you for pointing that out!
    – raffi
    Commented Dec 29, 2013 at 22:44

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There is no option besides SSO, and gcontrol is the cheapest. Google is designed to be accessed from anywhere and until they implement a free solution to restrict access to IPs or times, only 3rd party SSO solutions with that feature will accomplish what you want to do.

Obviously if you want to truly restrict all email download to be in certain locations/times, you'll have to turn off POP and IMAP access. I use gControl and it works quite well.

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