I came across a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Robert Plant, (no not that Robert Plant!) an associate professor at the University of Miami, which focuses on how the cloud seems to be an attractive option for many companies, however, there are still a lot of questions that companies need to consider and address beforehand.
The article, “To Cloud, or Not to Cloud”, highlights the following important questions to ask before moving to the cloud:
- How much do we save, if anything?
- How complicated is your software?
- What are the legal issues?
- Where’s the data?
- How accessible is it?
- How secure is it?
Before assuming what may be best for their organization, company IT leaders need to clearly address these questions and as the article highlights the reality is that they’ll learn that moving to the cloud isn’t so clear-cut as some companies make it seem to be.
While Sendmail agrees with many of the points that Plant shares in his article, there is also a point where we disagree with. Knowing email the way we do, we feel that labeling email a “nonessential system”, and suggesting that it be the first to go to the cloud, is a misnomer and a disservice to IT admins.
IT organizations continue to realize that it is not as easy to migrate things such as email – or as advantageous – to the cloud as it may initially seem. In fact, based on our unique insights and feedback from our customers, we still believe that email is a business-critical application and the dominant messaging tool used by enterprises, and large companies can’t just easily move all email functions to the cloud. Some functions of an email infrastructure have become a commodity, such as spam and virus filtering. This function can be moved to the cloud fairly easily. Mailboxes can also be moved, however that is a much bigger undertaking. As for the email backbone, which is the middleware that glues all of this together, manages on-premises email-generating applications, takes care of policy enforcement, and much more, is the most difficult to move, but certainly not impossible. In a recent report from Gartner, “Email is a Commodity and Other Fairy Tales”, analyst, Matthew Cain, noted, “A deep understanding of the operational, architectural, policy and feature requirements of an email system will help organizations ascertain the suitability of the cloud provisioning model for email services.”
Despite our disagreement on the suggestion that email is nonessential and relatively easy to move to the cloud first, for the most part, many of the questions addressed in this Wall Street Journal article maps to what Sendmail has been sharing with its customers for quite some time.
As we predicted at the beginning of the year, we are seeing the cloud hype within the messaging infrastructure market tempered due to compliance, regulatory and security risks that companies are realizing come with the price of moving to the cloud. For further information on evaluating a move to the cloud, you can revisit the blog post we wrote last year, “Considering a Move to the Cloud? The Benefits and Risks You Should Know”, to get a clear snapshot on what Sendmail recommends enterprises should consider before moving to the cloud. Also check out the resources on this page: enabling email for the cloud.