Moving, or Not Moving, Corporate Email to the Cloud

There is a lot in the technical media these days about “the cloud” and about “Software as a Service.” While these two terms are not completely interchangeable, they both refer to using software delivered to your company by an application provider. The advantage to this is that your company will not have to invest in the infrastructure and technical talent to manage this application. Salesforce.com and Google mail (gmail) are two examples of Software as a Service.

In the case of corporate email, instead of having an email server or servers on site and paying someone to manage those servers, you would instead connect to an email server managed by third party, paying a monthly fee per user. There are some very compelling reasons to move some application to Saas, but the hype doesn’t always withstand sober scrutiny.

I strongly considered moving a client from their on-site Exchange server to Google Apps Premier Edition for their email. The end users would not notice much of a change – they would still use Outlook for email. I’m still figuring out how collaborative calendaring would work and how we would replace the public folders being used in Exchange, but I’m sure Google’s solution would be sufficient, if not superior.
The three issues that made me decide against moving the client to Google Apps are:

1. Control : Is the client ready to surrender control of a mission critical service to an organization that is largely unaccountable? Google App’s Premier Edition claims to have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but the Service Level Agreement isn’t satisfactory – if they fall below 99%, then the client must request a service credit for 3 to 15 free days of service. Fifteen free days of service won’t make up for a day of email being down. Right now, if the client’s email goes down, they call us. We are 100% responsible for making sure it works. No excuses, no other vendors to blame. And if we don’t perform, the client is free to find a service provider who will.
2. Cost: Currently, Exchange 2003 is running on a Windows Server 2003 box. Besides patching it, there is no maintenance required outside of an unscheduled reboot every other month or so. So the cost of sticking with what they have is essentially zero. The cost of moving to Google Apps Premier is $50/user/year. For a 50 person company, this would mean writing a check for $2500 just to interrupt the status quo.
3. ITMG’s Business Model: This last concern is weak, and is similar to #1 above, but I can’t simply dismiss it. Is it a good idea for me to steer my clients toward using a service I have no control over? The worst case is this: I make the argument for moving to Google Apps, the client agrees, I move them over, and then there is a two day Google Apps outage. I can’t do anything at all to help the client in the immediate term. I’m uncomfortable with this…it positions ITMG as a sales organization (Buy some Google Apps!!) and not a service organization. As my clients know, I have no problem working ourselves out of a job – but we do this by making client systems more reliable and predictable, not by asking them to trade a reliable system for one that we can’t control.

All that said, I think Google Apps is an excellent choice for many organizations. C! Tech Solutions. just moved the Ferndale Chamber of Commerce over to Google Apps, and they have been thrilled with it. For small organizations, for less corporate organizations, or for organizations that can stomach the idea of not being able to control their own destiny, Google Apps seems like a no-brainer. And, Google is an excellent company with a delivery-of-service record far exceeding the picture I paint when discussing concerns.

A big part of I.T. Management is risk management. In this case, at this point in time, the status quo is more than adequate, and the costs and risks associated with moving to Google Apps don’t justify the benefits.