Sendmail’s very own Jim Seaman, VP of Federal, had the opportunity to do a Q&A contributed piece for Enterprise Systems Journal, titled, “Q&A: Why Government Agencies Are Finally Moving to the Cloud”. Enterprise Systems Journal editor-in-chief, James Powell, spoke with Jim about the government sector and the cloud.
In the piece, Jim discussed what’s driving the move, what applications are the first to be moved, and what cloud deployments models are the most popular and some of the key points he noted include:
- Cost savings is the driver and the attention-getter when it comes to cloud computing in the federal government, as well as data center consolidation, which has a major impact on reducing the cost of delivering IT services.
- An accelerating trend is federal agencies migrating applications that are low in security risk to the cloud.
- E-mail is one of the first applications to be considered for the cloud, in part because the perception is that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and dozens of others offer free Web-based e-mail to the public for years, and that it’s “easy.”
- IT organizations are learning that it is not as easy as it appears, especially for large organizations with complex messaging requirements.
- There is potentially a significant ROI for moving a layer of an e-mail infrastructure to the cloud, but there are more risks involved, such as storing sensitive business information outside that respective organizations secure internal network.
- In looking at the e-mail infrastructure, the gateway security systems that filer inbound e-mail are the easiest to migrate to the cloud.
- Private clouds will be the most frequent type of cloud deployment model in government, with the second most frequent being community clouds.
In order to help agencies move to the cloud, Sendmail provides Global 2000 companies and government agencies the e-mail backbone infrastructure (“middleware”) required to move the commodity functions (such as virus and spam filtering) to the cloud.
To read more about government agencies moving to the cloud, you can reference the full article here. We look forward to your comments and thoughts.