IT cost reduction ideas: email in the cloud

There are many different ways that your business can work towards successful IT cost reduction. The key to any successful and profitable business in today’s economic climate is to be as fluid and lean as possible. In the first of a new ”Ideas’ series, I’d like to focus on the IT cost reduction potential from making use of web- / cloud-hosted email services.

‘Cloud-computing’ is a term that has moved in to common usage in IT and a basic definition of it is that it is the delivery of hosted services over the Internet. With cloud-based email you are able to significantly lower costs whilst keeping your company more flexible. 20% of all the world’s email will be cloud-hosted by 2012, at least halving the costs of on-premise email in that time.

For the next few years, a fierce competition between household names in the industry will take place, all stepping up their attempts to secure market share as businesses take IT servers onto internet-hosted platforms. If you thought Google was only about search and advertising and Amazon only about selling books and DVD’s, think again.

Behind Dell, HP and IBM, Google is the fourth largest manufacturer of computer servers; all used internally to host its services. Amazon is growing its Web Services for enterprises offering quickly. Microsoft enters the fray next Tuesday 17th November when it officially launches the Azure online Office and hosted services solution.

So how can you achieve IT cost reductions by using cloud email services? The main thing to remember is that you won’t be making any capital investments by using these services. Instead, your investment is in the service itself, and by “renting out” these services – or even potentially receiving them for free depending on the size and scope of your needs – you can see substantial cost savings. Organisations that have taken their email ‘into the cloud’ find that they can free up their own servers for other tasks – they let the cloud-based web servers handle all of their needs for communication, and take the management and infrastructure costs out of their organisation.

In tomorrow’s follow-up to this post, I’ll share some of the more intangible benefits that enterprise-sized companies are achieving through running cloud-based email communications.