How to Move E-mail to the Cloud: 7 Planning Tips

CIO — E-mail is arguably one of the easiest apps to move to the cloud, yet some CIOs remain hesitant to hand e-mail over to a third-party cloud-based e-mail provider such as Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM) or Google (GOOG), says a new report from Forrester Research (FORR).

Half of the 934 SMB and enterprise IT decision-makers surveyed for the report say they're "not interested" in adopting hosted e-mail.

However, pressure is mounting to drive down costs by moving parts of a company's IT infrastructure to the cloud, according to Forrester. Despite the 51 percent of survey respondents who are holding on to e-mail, 46 percent are either interested in or plan to move e-mail to the cloud in the next year?

CIO — E-mail is arguably one of the easiest apps to move to the cloud, yet some CIOs remain hesitant to hand e-mail over to a third-party cloud-based e-mail provider such as Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM) or Google (GOOG), says a new report from Forrester Research (FORR).

Half of the 934 SMB and enterprise IT decision-makers surveyed for the report say they're "not interested" in adopting hosted e-mail.

However, pressure is mounting to drive down costs by moving parts of a company's IT infrastructure to the cloud, according to Forrester. Despite the 51 percent of survey respondents who are holding on to e-mail, 46 percent are either interested in or plan to move e-mail to the cloud in the next year?

For the report, entitled "Learn from Those Who Have Made the Leap to Cloud-Based Email", Forrester analysts interviewed IT pros at companies including pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Fairchild Semiconductor (FCS) — Microsoft and Google customers respectively — for tips on planning for and migrating to cloud-based e-mail systems.

For starters, an organization needs to know if it's ready for the cloud. Some companies need to retain e-mail on-premise for compliance and legal reasons. Take a hard look at your e-mail environment. An evaluation process, according to Forrester's research, should include:

• An analysis of what employees need: What are their mailbox size requirements? Does the amount of legacy to migrate differ between users? Do they all have the same recovery requirements?
• Mapping out application integration requirements: Employees aren't the only users of a company's e-mail platform — mail-enabled CRM, finance, and other business applications often depend on e-mail for workflow as well.
• A comparative cost analysis: Forrester research has shown that many companies underestimate or don't know the cost of their corporate e-mail service. The cost for cloud hosting is more transparent, with providers revealing their per-use, per-month costs for easy comparison.
• An analysis of regulatory and other security requirements: Your company might be subject to regulations like HIPAA or FISMA that set controls for e-mail storage and access. Also, if your organization has security requirements beyond what government regulations dictate, migrating your e-mail to the cloud may not be feasible.

After determining whether an e-mail cloud migration is right for your company, it is now time to prepare for the migration. Here are seven planning tips that Forrester culled from various interviews with SMB and enterprise early adopters.

1. Clean Up Directory

It's necessary to "clean house" when moving e-mail from on-premise to a cloud environment. That means cleaning out Active Directory (if you use Microsoft Active Directory) of stale records and outdated domains. One Forrester interviewee, a financial services customer, put it succinctly: "We didn't want to replicate our own existing mess to a provider."