On-Premise+vs.+Cloud+Email

= Cloud Email = toc Traditional email systems are housed on site by servers runs by Network Administrators. These email system costs in terms of work time, hardware, and software. These costs are creating a movement to have email systems moved to the Cloud. See Cloud storage here.

Why use Cloud Email systems?
Traditional email systems require an email server. This server must be purchased, upgraded, and maintained by in house by hand. Moving to Cloud email systems can help curve the costs of email. Cloud Emal 101 provides this table for assessing the comparison between On-Premise vs. Cloud email systems.


 * Feature || On-Premise Email || **Cloud-Based Email** ||
 * Storage ||< **Spiraling Storage Costs. **

 As your email volumes grow, generating more and more messages per day as well as larger email attachments, you need to continually add more server capacity. When your future growth is uncertain, this becomes even more challenging. ||< **Predictable Costs. **

 Cloud-based solutions leverage the latest and greatest storage technology, shielding customers from the complexity of storage growth and management, while providing them with the best technologies possible as soon as they are available. ||  Traditional, on-premise solutions have heavy upfront costs, unpredictable expense spikes (often associated with annual software licenses), storage growth fees, server and equipment failures, and ongoing maintenance costs. ||< **Pay-As-You-Go, Monthly Pricing. **  Cloud-based solutions offer predictable, monthly pricing, generally charged on a flat per user, per month basis (often between $10 and $15 for each mailbox). This makes budgeting easier and streamlines your cash flow, since you don’t have to worry about depreciation of expensive upfront capital expenses. ||  With on-premise messaging solutions, you need to budget for significant hardware and software capital expenses. Additional costs come in the form of spare parts, overtime for administrative staff (especially if you want 24–7–365 reliability) and other maintenance-related expenses. ||< **Operating Expense. **  With cloud-based email solutions, there are no initial upfront commitments for infrastructure, hardware or licensing, and ongoing IT costs are minimal, so the returns are immediate, which results in much faster payback periods. ||  Because of the upfront capital investments, it takes several weeks or even months to properly setup and configure most on-premise solutions. ||< **Days. **  Customers can deploy cloud-based solutions in days, rather than weeks or months, because there is no hardware or software to install and provision. || The cost and complexity of implementing backup and recovery systems, local clustering and high availability, and offsite replication of archives to a disaster recovery site is overwhelming for many companies to handle internally. ||< **Table stakes for Multi-Tenant Environments. **  Cloud-based messaging providers offer high availability to all of their customers and invest millions of dollars to build secure and reliable infrastructures. This usually includes server clusters and other forms of redundant hardware to ensure the cloud-based solution is always available. Plus, cloud email customers usually benefit from geographically dispersed, SAS-70 II Tier-4 compliant data centers, full redundancy and 99.99% network availability**.** || <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Estimates suggest that IT labor makes up approximately two-thirds of messaging costs. Even a “simple” Exchange Server deployment is complicated, and with complexity comes cost. The first cost you are likely to encounter is training your administrative staff to design, deploy and maintain an effective Exchange Server environment. As expensive and time consuming as the training is, though, it quickly becomes obsolete. ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Messaging Experts. ** <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Cloud-based solutions let you refocus your IT resources on more strategic initiatives to help grow your business, instead of merely maintaining the systems required to operate it. Most cloud-based providers employ experienced and certified staff to maintain their systems. In light of their service level agreements (SLAs), this is a requirement. || <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> With on-premise solutions, your IT department is responsible for all of the day-to-day tasks necessary to keep your servers, storage, software, backup systems and network up-and-running optimally 24–7–365. This includes security patches, system upgrades and performing regular backups. ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Offload the Headaches. ** <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> You can offload the burden and complexity by relying upon a third-party service provider and their SLAs (usually exceeding 99.9%) to optimize email uptime. In order to meet their stringent SLAs, cloud-based solution providers have invested millions of dollars into their architectures, built-in redundancy and fail-over systems. || <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> When your email goes down, your IT department has to scramble to get it up-and-running ASAP, because it is mission critical. And if you do not have a disaster recovery or email continuity solution in place, it can often take hours to troubleshoot. Consequently, IT departments need to provide regular updates to users while at the same time investigating the root cause of outages. ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> One Culprit to Blame. ** <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Since you have effectively shifted your IT burden and headaches to a vendor, they are on the hook to serve you. Most reputable vendors offer customers expert support, provided by a dedicated Client Services team, at no additional cost. So look for vendors that can do everything—including the worrying—for you. || <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Your in-house staff must manage the on-going maintenance of email system to ensure email is always up and running. With conventional software, it takes considerable planning and effort to upgrade to newer versions and manage upgrades. ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Transparent, Continuous Upgrades. ** <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> When you turn to a hosted solution, you immediately have a fully equipped, top-of-the-line system that is continually updated and maintained. This saves you thousands of dollars in server hardware, software, upgrades and the expertise to run it all. || <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> When your company grows, your infrastructure must grow even faster. Scaling an in-house Exchange environment requires planning and additional budget (to purchase more servers or software). The problem is worse if your company is downsizing, since you have already invested in and configured your system for a specified number of users. ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Easy to Add and Subtract Users. ** <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Since hosting providers have extensive hardware and software resources, they can scale smoothly and easily. Cloud hosting, in particular, is especially designed for scalability, since you only use and pay for the infrastructure resources you need. || <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> An increasingly important part of administering a messaging environment is providing a continuously updated advanced spam and virus solution to keep your email secure. ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Protection Already Built-in. ** <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Most cloud-based email providers offer a basic level of spam and virus protection (many offer advanced spam and virus protection for an additional fee), which eliminates 99 percent of unwanted email before it ever reaches your inbox. A good solution also screens for and quarantines any viruses, which can bring your email system to a screeching halt. || <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Research suggests that most small and mid-sized enterprises experience more than 40 total hours of unplanned email downtime each year. And some estimates suggest that upwards of 40 percent of these outages last more than 24 hours. ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Access Your Email Anytime, Anywhere. ** <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> Cloud-based providers are usually better equipped to recover from an email outage. In fact, most cloud-based solutions guarantee their uptime and have built-in continuity systems to ensure your data does not go down, even if one of their data centers is impacted by network or hardware malfunctions. || <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;"> With most on-premise environments, in-depth technical knowledge is required to setup new users and perform tasks like email routing and managing mailbox storage limits. ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Web-based Control. ** <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Cloud-based providers allow you to manage your entire hosted email environment, including permissions, storage, mailbox creation and more, with just a few clicks, using an intuitive control panel. ||
 * Pricing ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Heavy Upfront Investment. **
 * TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Capital Expense. **
 * Deployment Time ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Weeks or Months **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">.
 * Enterprise Class Infrastructure ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Not Practical for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses. **
 * IT Expertise ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Lack of Messaging Expertise. **
 * Ongoing Maintenance ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Regular Patching & Monitoring. **
 * Customer Service ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">It’s All YOU. **
 * Upgrades ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Disruptive and Unpredictable **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">.
 * Scalability ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">The Costs are Already Invested **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">.
 * Antivirus & Anti-Spam Protection ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Another Layer of Complexity **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">.
 * Disaster Recovery ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">How Long Can You Go without Email? **
 * Administrative Controls ||< **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">Technical Expertise Required **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333px;">.

Examples Of Cloud email systems include:

 * AppRiver
 * Cisco WebEx Mail
 * Zoho Mail

**References**
Cloud Email 101. (n.d.). //Shoud I go the the Cloud/ on-Premise vs the Cloud//. Retrieved Novmeber 15, 2011, from Cloud Email 101: @http://www.cloudemail101.org/should-i-go-to-the-cloud/on-premise-vs-the-cloud