Last week, we had the wonderful opportunity of hosting an event with Harris Corporation at the Congressional Country Club in Washington DC. Together we offered a joint session for professionals in the area titled Secure Email in the Cloud: Fact, Fiction and Reality. The goal of the event was to bring together industry experts to provide large commercial and government enterprises insights and advice around secure email in the cloud and to help organizations better understand the benefits and challenges associated with migrating email to the cloud.
I was joined by our very own Jim Seaman, VP Federal, Sendmail as well as Rich Plane, Head of Engineering and Development for Harris, along with over 70 attendees. Event participants ranged from individuals with government agencies and commercial enterprises’ to system integrators to Sendmail partners (Harris, Raytheon, VMware, Zimbra and others) to analysts from Gartner and more.
The conversations had at the event were of true interest and it was encouraging to see everyone engaging and talking about a range of topics around email in the cloud. The key take-aways from the presentations and conversations were around the fact that it’s not as easy as some think it is to pick up email from on-premises and move it to the cloud and that large enterprises are indeed discovering holes in cloud email – it’s not a cookie cutter solution. The cloud is not just hype and organizations need to assess cloud email and consider both the drivers for change – cost savings, economies of scale, and increased productivity – as well as the risks – compliance and security, control and customization.
Sendmail, for example, has longstanding credibility with strong data points and proof points around messaging compliance, control, security and customization and the fact that there are thousands of machine-generated and application-enabled SMTP apps that could cause an email migration to the cloud to be a disaster. Part of the excitement and buzz of the event was around our announcement that same day that Sendmail has joined forces with Harris to offer secure cloud-based email for federal agencies looking to comply with the “Cloud First” policy and for large commercial enterprises concerned about security, compliance and manageability of their email.
Thank you to everyone that made this event a success – from our team, to our partners, to everyone that joined us – we couldn’t have done it without you and we look forward to continuing those conversations!
If you have any questions or would like to learn more about what was discussed at the event, we’ll look forward to your comments.