There’s a lot of talk these days about “Cloud Computing,” the latest fad in IT. Of course most industry veterans view Cloud Computing as the new name for “managed services,” “software as a service” (SaaS), and even the old moniker of “timesharing” back in the old days. Cloud Computing makes a lot of sense for enterprises wishing to offload computing costs from their own data center and outsource the application to a service provider responsible for all the administrative hassles and costs of computing with a single fee.
In the email world, we’ve noticed many enterprise customers embracing cloud computing for inbound email filtering (e.g. handing Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus cleansing of the high incoming volumes of mail). This makes good business sense as Anti-Spam filtering has fast become a commodity application, and commodity applications are logical expenses to outsource vs. handle within ones own IT infrastructure. Once an enterprise discovers the attraction of cloud computing for lowering costs of filtering email, it is very common for them to suddenly recognize the importance of the core email backbone infrastructure which has supported the in-house email filtering applications.
At Sendmail, we have seen a rise in our business for modernizing the messaging processing infrastructure whenever an enterprise starts the analysis of cloud computing for email filtering applications. Often the value of complex routing and delivery of critical and important email is taken for granted by IT organizations looking to cut costs. Suddenly there is recognition that there has been an over emphasis on stopping unwanted email and little attention has been paid to guaranteeing the delivery of wanted mail to the right mailbox. Guaranteed message delivery is especially important for global organizations with multiple gateways in various locations, multiple domain names due to mergers and acquisitions or marketing promotions, and is essential to any enterprise with strict compliance regulations that must be followed. This makes the messaging processing infrastructure for central policy-based, directory-driven email a high-value need and it can easily be cost-justified for obvious “control” of IP.
Modernizing the message processing infrastructure may include embracing cloud computing for low value commodity applications but requirements for mandatory control of sensitive data will need to be managed on-site. Organizations concerned with preventing data leaks have to manage outbound mail content. Messages must be scanned, reviewed, and acted upon according to centralized policy. Even incoming messages which have gone through the cleansing process via the outsourced cloud computing supplier, must be handled efficiently, and delivered, copied, archived or reviewed for accurate/speedy delivery on the premises of the enterprise. These higher value actions take place in a modernized message processing infrastructure that Sendmail provides with Sentrion® MP. Anyone investigating the merits of managing email in the cloud needs to take into account all the infrastructure requirements which are also a major component of the solution. I’d be happy to share our customer contacts to help in this analysis.