You may have seen the news that Sendmail announced a new Cloud offering. I wanted to give you some background on why we decided to make this option available to our customers. Historically, Cloud computing has been geared toward small and medium size companies as a way to cut down on the overhead of having on-site computing resources. Over the past couple of years though, larger organizations (which comprise the majority of Sendmail’s customers) have begun to reap the benefits that Cloud computing offers. They have found out what smaller companies already knew: moving certain computing functions off-site can reduce overhead and maintenance costs, and allow for better scalability, and reliability.
Practically, most large companies will never be able to switch to an all-Cloud architecture, but moving certain “commodity” functions, such as AV/AS filtering to the Cloud can reduce data center footprint, network traffic, and energy consumption. As they cut costs in these areas by moving to the Cloud, companies will see an immediate return on their investment. However, for larger businesses there will always be a need to have on-site message infrastructure to manage higher value complex message routing, delivery and content policy requirements. For example, messages caught by outbound or internal content controls typically should not leave the private network.
Would you consider moving some of your messaging infrastructure to the Cloud? Let us know what you think.