Discussion on:

Functional and financial benefits of cloud-based email

Every time I have done the analysis of cloud vs. on-prem, the cloud has come out more expensive if you already have the infrastructure in place. The math probably works if you are talking about a new email platform but maintenance on the old one, which icludes upgrades, always seems to be a fraction of what the long term cost of cloud would be. The internal cost is very predictable if you have a stable employee population and I have never seen the utilization as being very volatile either. Just not convinced by your arguments based on my experience.

I read a lot of hype about the cloud touting how great it is for email, storage, etc..., but no one talks about the elephant in the room. If your data is all on the cloud, or even just your email, what happens when you can't get to the internet? If you have most of your data and operations in the ephemeral cloud, and you can't get to the internet, operations cease. Our internal networks here, are much more stable than our ISP. We have a couple of products that are .asp models, and when the ISP has issues, they are unusable.

A good example is the tornado that went through our town in February. We were on generator for hours, and we could still work and take care of our patients, but we didn't have internet access for a day until the ISP had their systems repaired. If our apps, storage, email, were cloud based, then the historical patient data would have been inaccessible. Instead, we had our internal email for house-wide status updates, our clinical systems worked perfectly, and had only minor issues with the .asp applications.

No, I'm not convinced yet that the cloud is the way to go for anything other than offsite data backup. You never want to set yourself up where a single point of failure can take your business off-line. The cloud seems to have many single points of failure.

hard facts or evidence to show any real benefit to anyone but the cloud service provider shareholders.

We've had lots of complaints from users about slow performance since we moved our email to the cloud. Seems to have affected admins who are delegates for their managers especially hard. We are also not looking forward to having to re-create OST files for those 20G (yes, G not M) mailboxes when troubleshooting or re-imaging machines.

I would say the size of the company would be important in choosing the cloud for email. A company of say less than 100 with a small profit margin would benefit from avoiding the fixed cost of getting an email system in place. For a large company, they would have the resources to get a system up and running and it would be just another server in the data center. In either case you still have the time costs for creating accounts, resetting pws, user questions, ...

As for the financial, an email server is a semi fixed cost which over time goes to 0. With the cloud, you pay monthly so it's predictable, but still costly and yet another bill to pay.
If I were making the decision, I would look at total costs long term (and short), size of company, and the sensitivity of the emails themselves (i.e. patient information v. email in retail environment).