Friday
Jan162009
Cloud-based email is the cheapest option
Friday, January 16, 2009 at 10:34AM
I've been saying it for a while but Forrester and ReadWriteWeb both agree, cloud-based email is the cheapest option.
In the report, Forrester explains that it's:
and that:
So now that we've got that covered, lets take a quick look why. With the traditional system you have so much overhead. Energy prices are through the roof and that's necessary for both power and cooling. Speaking of cooling, the larger your enterprise, the more cooling power you need and the more money you spend on cooling equipment and repairs.
After that you have to look at hardware costs. This includes server, network, storage and security systems to keep all of this important hardware and data secure. Speaking of data, you need software that reads and writes to that data. This too comes with a cost.
Once you've gotten past the whole physical/non-human things that cost money you can dive into training, support and development/administration work needed within the organization. While SaaS (and Google specifically) don't negate the need for training/support it greatly reduces the amount of people and time spent on these tasks.
Through great documentation and a much easier-to-use interface, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Exchange allow a much smaller ramp-up time for new users to get used to the system. Many people already use some of these systems for their personal email so they can hop right in if you're using Google or Yahoo email services in the office!
In the report, Forrester explains that it's:
...cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees.
and that:
Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise solutions andother cloud-based email services - even for very large enterprises
So now that we've got that covered, lets take a quick look why. With the traditional system you have so much overhead. Energy prices are through the roof and that's necessary for both power and cooling. Speaking of cooling, the larger your enterprise, the more cooling power you need and the more money you spend on cooling equipment and repairs.
After that you have to look at hardware costs. This includes server, network, storage and security systems to keep all of this important hardware and data secure. Speaking of data, you need software that reads and writes to that data. This too comes with a cost.
Once you've gotten past the whole physical/non-human things that cost money you can dive into training, support and development/administration work needed within the organization. While SaaS (and Google specifically) don't negate the need for training/support it greatly reduces the amount of people and time spent on these tasks.
Through great documentation and a much easier-to-use interface, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Exchange allow a much smaller ramp-up time for new users to get used to the system. Many people already use some of these systems for their personal email so they can hop right in if you're using Google or Yahoo email services in the office!
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