Our professional services team tells me they’re talking more and more with systems administrators who are being pushed by their upper management to outsource the email function to help reduce IT costs. Indeed, we’ve all heard that the cloud can save money, however, as usual it’s not that cut and dry. What these systems administrators are looking for is more information to help them prove to their upper management that a wholesale move of the messaging infrastructure to the cloud is not always viable. Most agree that cloud sourcing certain components of the messaging infrastructure is a good strategy, but an intelligent email backbone (policy enforcement, routing between mail systems, etc) will always be required for large companies and therefore a hybrid infrastructure is the only way to go.
As far as which components get cloud sourced, the Exchange environment (primarily the mailboxes) can be outsourced as well as inbound message hygiene, but there are real concerns around monitoring and security of internal and outbound messages. Internetnews.com author, David Needle, refers to a recent survey of 150 IT decision makers in which 80 percent of those polled said cloud security and manageability are key challenges they are hoping to solve via industry and vendor solutions –until this happens, giving up complete control of the messaging will not happen.
The big companies (Microsoft, Google, et al) are pushing hard to get enterprises to move their email to the cloud and are “throwing in” inbound mail filtering (spam, viruses, and other malware) for “free” if the business agrees to migrate their messaging infrastructure to the vendors service. Everyone knows nothing is really free, especially those IT email experts on the front lines—these guys are responsible for not only providing 24×7 email services to the company, but they are also expected to make sure their company is compliant with both internal governance and external compliance regulations, and more. To accomplish this level of message management requires deep message content inspection and intelligent policy enforcement. Should these types of functions be done outside the walls of the enterprise? The answer is almost always no—this is one of many reasons why those responsible don’t want to lose control over message content inspection, routing, encryption, and other policy enforcement, as well as lose the visibility and reporting capabilities of their messaging system. It’s hard for the customers’ I’m talking with to imagine a cloud service provider who will manage all aspects of their email requirements with the same clarity they bring. In fact, 100% of our customers who had aspirations of moving their whole messaging infrastructure to the cloud realized after working with our messaging architects, that it was just not viable.
So if you are making a case upward on finding a solution that takes advantage of the benefits of moving to the cloud while addressing the risks, we want to help. Here are a few resources to get you started.
Read the entire Internetnews.com article: IT Survey Spotlights Cloud Computing’s Potential, Misconceptions