Email in the Cloud : Current Status and Considerations

Emails are a mean of communication which vital in private life and in business. Email in the Cloud gives the advantage of Off-Premise management. From the examples of the large companies who already have migrated their infrastructure to on-premise solution, it is assumable that the difficulties faced by companies in dealing with the huge number of Emails are solved to certain extent by Solutions as Service in the form of Email in the Cloud.

Especially in the companies, this mean of communication creates many difficulties in terms of managing servers, storage and load issues in IT departments. To make the matters worse there are the pressing demands of the employees who also claim workplace tools for viewing and archiving of e-mail exclusively for private use. The workers complain of limitations related to their business account and especially find it difficult to store Emails locally on their laptop. Many companies with corresponding IT departments have therefore chosen a deployment management system for the emails that mimics the dedicated offers to individuals by moving in the cloud.

Email in the Cloud : What it Means

Despite many business realities continue to choose on-premise infrastructure, the spread of services to suit the business environment and the improvement of the safety aspects and control infrastructure have made sure that the cloud model of development will became a very popular not only in the enterprise environments, but also in small and medium-sized businesses and startups. The basic concept of email in the cloud is very simple: a provider is responsible to process, manage and store emails on multiple remote data centers, completely replacing or supporting the on-premise infrastructure.

In this way, the cloud becomes a backend messaging system configured according to need, with services for filtering spam and viruses, storage services, encryption and much more. Practically, Email is an extended part of telecom.

Email in the Cloud : The Advantages

And, as with any application that moves to the cloud, including email management, the cloud brings concrete benefits to the companies, which are different in nature.

1. It changes the pattern of business investment, from a model of capital expenditure (CAPEX) to a model of operational expenditure (OPEX), which is spent for using the cloud service, it reduces or completely eliminates the cost to develop and provide assets and systems for the management of electronic mail.
2. It lowers the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), as it reduces the cost of the life cycle of infrastructure related to the purchase, installation, and maintenance.
3. It simplifies IT services, because of the ease of use of many platforms proposed in the cloud.
4. It frees up resources for IT departments from routine tasks (infrastructure management, email servers, configurations, and so on) to be devoted to more strategic tasks.
5. You as an user have the opportunity to enable new services or extend existing ones quickly, because of the flexibility offered by cloud resources and simplicity of administration panels offered by the providers.

Email in the Cloud : Example Usages and Other Notes

Each of these benefits has prompted companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, Panasonic, Intercontinental Hotels, Roche and many others to look at the cloud as a viable alternative to offer their employees a resizable flexible system, according to the needs and above all, always available and accessible, designed to allow then to all workers a better standard collaborative, allowing them to focus on their business function.

Private companies echoed about institutions who have moved their email in the cloud : the state of California, the city of Los Angeles and many American universities, such as Saint Leo, Abilene Christian University and many others.

Despite the indisputable benefits, one can not say that the cloud model for managing email has buried the on-premise model: many companies prefer to continue to invest in server and storage infrastructure to maintain internally, not because of fear or distrust of the cloud, but because the emails are often associated with services which can not be outsourced (CRM, systems analysis, etc.).