Finding: Most Enterprises Prefer Managed, Single-Tenant Cloud Solutions for Email

By Laura Stotler
TMCnet Contributing Editor

A third-party, managed, single-tenant cloud is the preferred enterprise method for handling email, according to new research findings from Intermedia (News - Alert). The company commissioned Researchscape International to query more than 300 U.S. IT managers about their use or intended use of AWS for enterprise cloud applications.

And while most IT managers are confident of their abilities to manage Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange on AWS, 90 percent preferred to deploy the application in a single-tenant cloud using third-party managed services for deployment and maintenance. According to a recent blog post from Intermedia, the researchers also discovered that only 32 percent of those queried hosted their email independently on IaaS.

In more positive news, email is on top of the list of applications companies plan to move to IaaS in the future. IT managers cited security, data migration and compliance issues as the top challenges they will face when it comes to moving their email applications to the cloud. A majority of executives also indicated they prefer email app pricing on a per user, per month basis over paying based on the volume of email.

“Why are we seeing this interest in moving email to the cloud?” asked Carles Cabre, head of product marketing for cloud server and private cloud at Intermedia, in the blog post. “I believe that it’s because the cloud has advanced in such a way as to address the top deployment challenges that mid-sized and larger organizations face — namely security, ease of data migration and total cost of ownership, as identified by the report. These challenges are addressed with dedicated, single-tenant cloud deployments.”

And even though 59 percent of IT managers stated they were confident about managing their own Exchange environments on AWS, 90 percent believe a third-party single-tenant managed cloud offering was a better fit for their enterprise. Respondents indicated that while they were comfortable handling security, administration, configuration, version control, integration, reliability and MDM surrounding cloud email, it simply makes more sense to use a managed cloud offering. By choosing a service provider like Intermedia to handle cloud email, enterprise IT resources are freed up to focus on revenue-generating core business initiatives.