Ian Emery, VP Sales, EMEA, Sendmail looks at how the cloud is affecting email Clouds are parting over enterprise mail processing. There’s currently so much media hype surrounding “Cloud Computing or “software as a service” (SaaS)” that you could be forgiven for thinking that a panacea for all business problems has suddenly appeared overnight.  In fact, we’ve been here before. The ideas behind the Cloud have been a long time in development. Previous guises such as ASP, grid computing and managed services generated similar amounts of excitement in their day but the applications were immature and the results ultimately disappointing.

Widespread broadband penetration, a desire to reduce data centre emissions and economic pressure to cut costs are today combining to give enterprises the strongest ever case for Cloud Computing.   Applications outsourcing makes a lot of sense to those enterprises that want to reduce the overall costs of running and maintaining their data centres.  Gartner Group forecasts that worldwide revenue from cloud services will reach $56 billion in 2009, up 21 percent on 2008, and $150 billion by 2013. 

In the world of e-mail, a large number of enterprise customers are for the first time seriously considering embracing cloud computing for filtering inbound email.  Commodity applications like anti-spam and anti-virus filtering are ideal for outsourcing.  Cloud services have proved very adept at cleansing high volumes of incoming mail of spam and viruses.

Some industry commentators have been quick to say that this renewed interest in SaaS is down to the world squeeze on financial credit.  However, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

First, according to Federal Reserve data, total bank credit has, after a brief tightening at the end of 2008, expanded again from January 2009 onwards.  In fact companies are demanding less credit as they anticipate a slow down in sales and less need to expand capacity.

Second, the economic situation is actually precipitating a preference for capital expenditure over operating expense.  Spend money once to save having to spend money on a recurring basis is the order of the day. If you opt to go for a service rather than upgrade your messaging infrastructure with, you take on a recurring liability rather than a one-off expense. From an accounting viewpoint it is better to modernize the messaging infrastructure with a capital investment that depreciates over time.  
The main stimulus for SaaS is to reduce the support costs of coping with the ever-growing volume of spam – thought to account for between 80 and 90 percent of all e-mail.  By asking a SaaS provider to clean your inbound e-mail of all unsolicited content and worms, you offload the responsibility for managing that ever-increasing volume to a third party.  It also makes your data centre footprint smaller and more manageable. 

An interesting phenomenon that we have observed at Sendmail is that once an enterprise discovers the benefits of cloud computing for commodity services like anti-spam and anti-virus, they also suddenly appreciate the value of having a core email backbone infrastructure to support all their in-house email applications.

Once a message is “cleansed” in the cloud and deemed ready for delivery, a modern e-mail processing infrastructure is still needed in-house to guarantee delivery to the right mailbox and route the communication according to central policies based on content, recipient location or classification, or corporate governance.

Activities such as mail flow between business units and partners, EDI over email, outbound bulk content distribution and application generated content are not easy to do in a cloud environment because the routing procedures start to become more complex.

An in-house e-mail gateway is still the best way to handle the kinds of complex routing many enterprises routinely require. Examples include multiple e-mail gateways in various locations; various e-mail domain names due to mergers and acquisitions; engaging in high-volume marketing promotions or preventing data leaks in outbound e-mail.

We are seeing a definite split emerging. Cloud computing does have a role to play in the modern message processing infrastructure - especially where comparatively low value, commodity applications such as anti-spam and anti-virus are concerned. Enterprises face an array of choice in this area. Vendors now offer Cloud solutions hosted in-house or as managed services through partners alongside their traditional on site solutions. 

Third party cloud services still have a number of inherent issues.  In some cases, for example, there is no store and forward for filtering in-bound e-mail. Customers may find they need many more connections to handle the volume and a requisite increase in the number of servers in their DMZ.  Other issues include the need for global redundancy and disaster recovery, de-centralization may bring a risk of non-compliance and it is unclear whether data protection regulations are broken if your data ends up hosted outside of Europe.

That is why mandatory requirements for controlling sensitive data tend to stay managed on-site. A good example is where organizations are concerned with preventing data leaks. They have to manage outbound and well as inbound mail content. Messages must be scanned, reviewed, and acted upon according to centralized policy.  Even incoming messages which have gone through the cleansing process via the outsourced supplier, must be handled efficiently, and delivered, copied, archived or reviewed for accurate/speedy delivery on the premises of the enterprise. These higher value actions can only take place in-house within a modernized message processing infrastructure.

In summary the advent of Cloud-based e-mail is causing enterprise organizations to take a more holistic view of their overall messaging infrastructure. The answer increasingly is to take a hybrid approach. The external messaging layer may be outsourced to Cloud-based services for commodity applications such as the cleansing of large volumes of inbound e-mail. At the same time organizations may modernize their in-house solution to meet specific, mission-critical, inter-departmental policies and regulatory compliance targets.