Should You Migrate to the Cloud?
The following question was recently posted on our community site (Netmail Community):
Although migrating your email system to the cloud may show significant cost reduction in the short term, do you believe it is the right thing to do?
Here's my answer.
Hmmm, this is a difficult question.
What is right for one organization may be disastrous for another. And the reasons vary from industry to industry, and country to country.
Just a fancy way of saying "it depends"...
Here are some thoughts:
1) In terms of pure operational cost, including infrastructure and personnel, sending everything to the cloud is of course attractive, particularly for organizations which need the service of an email platform but cannot compete to get the top notch IT resources needed to operate it.
2) From a storage and overall management perspective, it also makes a lot of sense.
3) Thinking about control of the information and insuring that the ways in which security may be breached are well understood, it is a potential disaster. When you contract out the service, you also relinquish a lot of control.
4) For the long-term ability to dictate policy and control infrastructure, it has many pitfalls. Some organizations may fall pray to proprietary formats and difficulties repatriating their data.
5) From a legal retention point of view, in some countries it is simply out of the question to let your data reside "lord knows where".
6) From an eDiscovery standpoint, it is very muddy: What capabilities exist in the live mail system? What are the processes and tools to support them? Etc.
Overall, I would call the picture "cloudy" (intentional pun). It certainly is not all blue skies ahead...
That is precisely why we strongly recommend (and promote, let's be frank, some of our products to do this) on-premise archiving of cloud-based email platforms so that a modicum of control of the data is maintained, and that it remains possible to take this data and "go somewhere else" with it, should the cloud ever start to rain down on your organization. (Ok, I'll stop now with the cloud puns.)
I hope this helps. Again, just my perspective as a lowly Product Manager.
– Sacha Veillette
Sacha Veillette is a Product Manager at Messaging Architects.
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