Seven skills of enterprise e-mail cloud migration

E-mail is arguably the easiest to migrate to the cloud, even though some CIOs (CIO) have given the email to Microsoft, according to a recent study published by Forrester Research, a market research firm. Third-party cloud-based e-mail providers such as IBM and Google remain hesitant.

Half of the 834 SME and big-business IT decision makers surveyed in the report said they had no interest in applying hosted e-mail.

However, according to Forrester, the pressure to move part of a company's IT infrastructure into the cloud to reduce costs is increasing. While 51% of respondents said they would stick with e-mail, 46% of respondents were either interested or planning to migrate their emails to the cloud next year.

To write this report entitled "Learning from people entering the cloud email field," Forrester analysts interviewed the IT professionals at some companies, such as the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, American Fairchild, Microsoft and Google, to provide some skills for planning and transitioning to cloud-based e-mail systems.

For starters, many organizations know whether it is ready for the cloud. Some companies need to keep e-mail within the company because of compliance and legal reasons. Take a serious look at your email environment. According to Forrester's research report, an assessment process should include the following steps:

• Analyze what employees need: What are their mailbox capacity requirements? What is the difference between the user and what is left over during migration? Do all users have the same recovery requirements?

• Describe application integration requirements: Employees are not the only users of a corporate e-mail platform, and the CRM, financial, and other business applications of e-mail implementations often rely on e-mail in the workflow.

• Comparative Cost Analysis: Forrester Research companies have shown that they underestimate or do not know the cost of their corporate email services. The cost of cloud hosting is more transparent, and providers disclose their per-use and monthly costs for easy comparisons.

• Analysis of regulatory requirements and other security requirements: Your company may be subject to regulations such as the Health Insurance Liability Act (HIPAA) or the Federal Information Security Administration Act (FISMA) to develop control over e-mail storage and access. In addition, if your organization has other security requirements in addition to enforcing government regulations, it is not feasible to migrate your e-mail to the cloud.

After deciding whether to migrate e-mail messages to your company in the cloud, it's time to move on. Here are seven planning techniques that Forrester has summed up in interviews with early adopters of small and medium-sized enterprises and large enterprises.

1. Clean up the catalogue

"Cleaning up the room" is necessary when migrating emails from within the enterprise to the cloud environment. This means cleaning up stale records and active directories for expired domain names (if you use the Microsoft Active Directory). ' We don't want to recreate our existing mess with providers, ' a user in the financial services industry said succinctly in an interview.

2. Estimating Bandwidth Requirements

Migrating e-mail to cloud services will increase the amount of Internet traffic. Therefore, you need to consider increasing the bandwidth requirements. Cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google and IBM have tools to provide bandwidth prediction guidelines.

For example, Christopher voce, author of the report, Christopher Woss, writes that Microsoft says that every 100 users who use Outlook e-mail software in large numbers need you to provide 37KB of bandwidth per second for e-mail. For users with moderate access to the Outlook Network Access service, you need to be close to 85KB of bandwidth per second.