Email Migration to the AWS Cloud Likely to Soar in 2016

By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor

Technology has a funny way of taking over more and more of what we do on a daily basis. And, because it streamlines a lot of activities and simplifies the way we need to manage much of our daily activities, we embrace the opportunity. Still, some of us continue to resist the powers afforded through cloud-based technology without realizing we’re probably already using it.

In the corporate environment, the push toward cloud-based technology is a little more pronounced, when it’s a factor. In the adoption of cloud IT, Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) is a power player. To get a better sense of just how big of an impact the company has in this space, Intermedia commissioned Researchscape International to survey more than 300 U.S. IT managers that were using or intended to use AWS.

The outcome of this research was developed into the white paper, IaaS Outlook: Managing and Migrating Business Applications in the Cloud. The purpose was to determine which applications would move to the cloud and the timeline to do so. The applications that tended to be the most hosted on IaaS/PaaS was Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) by 44 percent of organizations surveyed. A close second was file synchronization and sharing, used by 40 percent of organizations.

The least commonly used application on IaaS/PaaS is email at just 32 percent. Not surprising, when asked which application they would be moving to IaaS, the most common response was email. In fact, six percent of organizations surveyed reported their intention to move email to the IaaS environment in 2016 or 2017 as part of their cloud IT strategy.

A key driver behind this focus is the reality that IaaS solutions have finally evolved to the point that they can address the most serious challenges that arise in making the migration. The primary challenges that exist with email migration include security, data migration, compliance and the need for greater control than the cloud typically offers. Fortunately, each of these challenges is addressed with a dedicated, single tenant cloud deployment.

As such, 90 percent of respondents expressed an interest in moving their email service to this type of platform, managed by an expert third party. New payment models are also supporting this trend as 51 percent of IT managers surveyed prefer pricing per user and per month as compared with 28 percent who still prefer the typical cloud model of paying per volume of email.

And even as 59 percent were confident in their organization’s ability to manage the Exchange email environment on AWS, the same managers would still work with a third party and want a single tenant deployment on a per user, per month payment model. This points to significant opportunity for migrating to AWS and providing additional capabilities within environments where on-premise has been the norm. To learn more about this cloud IT focus, download the white paper.