Many organisations fail to reap the rewards of migrating e-mail to the cloud because of lack of planning.
So says Damian Nelson-Higley, product marketing manager at Microsoft SA, who notes "failure to plan is planning to fail".
According to Nelson-Higley, planning is crucial, as it enables organisations to figure out how to move all their data from e-mail servers to the cloud service, as well as whether they have the correct infrastructure in place to support this move, including Internet lines, bandwidth and existing e-mail servers.
A recent cloud computing survey of 117 people, mostly IT professionals, conducted by ITWeb, in partnership with VMware, discovered the majority of the respondents (71%) cited they have already migrated e-mail to the cloud.
Nelson-Higley points out cloud services bring a degree of flexibility, adaptability and responsiveness to the organisation that is simply not possible by using legacy infrastructure.
"Cloud-based e-mail allows employees to have access to their e-mail from anywhere, any time, and using virtually any Web-connected device, with no reliance on local infrastructure," he says.
Furthermore, he believes, cloud services allow a business's IT department to shift gears by focusing on becoming dynamic and adding value to the organisation, as opposed to managing local severs.
Cloud services enable a far simpler management of the environment, including new software, and make scaling easier, as companies can put a per-user cost to running their messaging platform, Nelson-Higley adds.
He notes a number of common concerns companies have about migrating e-mail to the cloud include fears of letting go of the control. "Organisations often express fears such as 'Who has access our data, and can we trust them? Are our bandwidth costs going to increase due to this move to the cloud?'"
To overcome these concerns and get the right guidance as well as advice when it comes to understanding their environment and planning the migration to the cloud, companies need to work with an experienced service provider or partner, says Nelson-Higley.
E-mail services provider, Mimecast, says for a successful e-mail migration to the cloud, organisations must identify the risks migration could introduce to their business, such as e-mail downtime, data loss, interruption to policy enforcement and cost escalation.
Local dairy products producer, Clover, recently migrated its traditional e-mail IT infrastructure and sates it has successfully migrated 2 000 e-mail users to the cloud.
"The ease of use associated with a cloud platform has been a huge benefit to Clover. Other than having our e-mail available on our mobile devices, today our employees can simply type their e-mail address and password into an Internet browser and access their e-mail service from anywhere, all they need is an Internet connection," says Francois Swanepoel, group manager of infrastructure services at Clover.
"Automatic syncing to the cloud has also made it significantly easier to replace or update devices if they are stolen or compromised. It has streamlined our internal IT framework considerably," he concludes.
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