Perhaps one of the first services to be centralized within many companies, e-mail - along with other associated services such as management, calendar and contacts - is rapidly becoming one of the leading cloud services, with many offers available to companies, including those of Microsoft, Google, IBM and even VMware.
Several companies are now considering whether to continue this service to them or move to the cloud.
Also the potential savings are attractive.
Here are some: Infrastructure Reductions For some companies, the hardware that supports email and collaboration related services represent a significant portion of IT budgets.
Companies need to calculate the ratio between the space on the server and storage and consumption of energy associated with, in addition to the requirements of cooling and backup equipment in determining the total financial impact of the hardware needed for the service.
Software Licenses It goes without saying that almost every email service / collaboration enterprise-wide charge for software licenses.
If you use Exchange, for example, you need to take into account the total cost of the licenses of Exchange Server, Exchange user client access licenses, licensing Windows Server and client access licenses.
The time spent by the staff Every system needs to be administered.
When working with email and collaboration systems, it certainly speaks of the above-mentioned infrastructure and licenses, but must also take account of individual user account management and help desk support requests made and associated with the service.
Turning to cloud computing, you delete some-not yet all - of these problems, but what is the ROI?.
Regarding infrastructure, there is a clear ROI from the moment that a company can eliminate the server and storage infrastructure that supported the first email.
Once the equipment withdrawn, there is also a significant reduction in electricity consumption and expenditure for air conditioning.
Even software licenses can be simplified now that there is a service less.
In terms of time spent by staff, however, the return is probably less clear.
Disappear even if the tasks of real system administration, IT staff is more committed in terms of negotiation and contract management to ensure that the company is not affected by service-level agreement (SLA) ill-defined or, worse still, of bad suppliers.
This obviously leads to an update of internal expertise.
Although the economic advantages are clear enough, the company must carefully consider various factors before deciding to dismiss what is a critical business function: Bandwidth The current bandwidth of the company is able to keep up with a far superior as an essential service which is continually used and stored outside? For companies highly centralized, the increases in costs due to the bandwidth erase the economic advantages of outsourcing service.
For companies that rely heavily on highly decentralized a distributed workforce and moving, we could in fact be an economic advantage in adopting the e-mail outsourcing.
If users no longer need to access the central system for email and instead use a provider, the company will be able to avoid increases of bandwidth in the future.
Business Processes How business processes can be affected by a shift to off-site hosting? The current email system and management of the agenda is closely linked to other services on-site services such as scheduling or third-party resources, synchronization of mobile devices and systems, customer relationship management? If so, these organizations need to undertake a trial process to determine how to handle all the requirements before launching into an outsourcing contract.
User Training If a company simply switches from Exchange to Exchange on-premise and hosted users continue to use Outlook, the issue of training is of little significance, although users should be aware that the quality of service will depend on the quality of the connection Internet (switch from one LAN to a wide area network can have a negative impact).
If, however, you are making the leap from Exchange to Google Apps, users will notice the change they will probably need to be prepared, even if you use the Google Apps Sync for Outlook.
Critically of The Service and Acceptance of Risk Some companies prefer to have control of all activities Exchange to Exchange not be at the mercy of a provider, no matter how solid is the SLA.
How crucial is the email for your company? Prefer to have control of all the process management infrastructure in the face of "challenging," or are willing to accept some minimal interruption of service? These are business decisions and business that must be shared with the executive...
All companies that are considering outsourcing initiatives of e-mail have to do an analysis - financial and operational - to determine the needs, the adequacy and whether the expected result of the project will go or not to meet business needs.