The world of computing is moving away from the on- premises IT model, where you keep buying servers, PCs and software licenses as your business grows. Cloud computing disrupts the conventional model and opens a new IT path for the small-to- midsize business: “clouds” of computing power, accessed over the Internet, become your server and your data center. Among the clouds: inexpensive applications that users can access on demand from any location and through a variety of devices.

Google explores the cloud computing trend at length in another whitepaper, “Cloud Computing— Latest Buzzword, or a Glimpse of the Future?”

This paper picks up where the other paper ended: Examining whether cloud computing makes good business sense for your company. Let’s start with some predictions:

• In the next 12 months, someone in your company will push for at least one on- demand application.
• Your company’s first encounter with cloud computing will be driven by needs to save money—but within a few months of the first deployment, your horizons will expand. You’ll see opportunities where you once saw problems. You’ll see corporate silos tumble as people from different departments and locations collaborate on projects.
• Ultimately, you may find that moving your data to the cloud actually improves security, scalability, access, and disaster recovery.

Overly optimistic? Perhaps. But as many companies are discovering, cloud computing offers rapid and significant results.



 

The study provides extensive information on costs in the areas of acquisition, maintenance, storage, setup and configuration, administration, wireless administration, downtime, staffing requirements, training and more.

This study analyzes and compares at the costs of deploying Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange 2007 in four mid-size organizations in the 300-1,000 user range, with a median of 800 users.

Hosting email with a specialist provider can offer a number of benefits, including lower and more predictable costs, improved system availability and better management of scarce IT resources, among other benefits. Osterman Research studies have demonstrated that a growing proportion of business and IT decision makers are considering and adopting hosted applications, including those in enterprises.

However, email represents only the beginning of the hosted paradigm. Many organizations, once convinced of the benefits of hosted email, will often migrate to other hosted services, including unified messaging, collaboration, archiving, encryption and productivity applications.

When Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition for $50 per user per year, it raised the question, “How much should we be paying for email?” But it’s not just this eye-popping price that should trigger the question about where you should run your email. Instead, every time you have to upgrade, switch, or add users to your email system, you should examine your fully loaded costs and consider the delivery alternatives. This report presents a spreadsheet cost model to help you calculate your fully loaded on- premise email costs and compare it against cloud-based alternatives. Bottom line: Cloud-based email makes sense for companies or divisions as large as 15,000 users. And every company can benefit from occasional users or email filtering to a cloud-based provider.

There isn’t much that hasn’t already been said about the criticality of email in business today — but the cost of hosting and managing your own email infrastructure is probably reaching the breaking point. Google’s $50-per-user annual fee has set a new floor in email pricing and is driving organizations to look inward at their situation and then outside at the hosted and cloud offerings. Companies are looking at upcoming email migrations, consolidations, and upgrades as times to potentially make a change. Before making a service architecture change, you should examine the needs of your different user constituencies, profile the applications that either integrate or work in concert with email, and understand the real costs of keeping email in your data center and running it yourself