5 Tips on Using Cloud Computing for Your Emails

Should your email live in the cloud? If you have asked yourself that question recently, you are not alone. Many companies like yours are pondering the answer at this very moment. While cloud computing and cloud-based email have become the buzzwords du jour, it’s important to understand the benefits beyond the hype.

Here are the main benefits of archiving your emails in the cloud:

  • Built-in Email Continuity. With email volumes growing exponentially, it is imperative to make sure those communications are protected in the event of a server failure or disaster. Email archiving offers built-in business continuity, so your operations don’t come to a halt if your mail server or cloud platform fails.
  • Mailbox Management and Storage. Email archiving helps simplify mailbox management (allowing your IT staff to eliminate PST/NSF files) and shrink skyrocketing storage costs with unlimited storage options.
  • Server Performance. Email archiving reduces the burden on your servers, making backups and restores more efficient, and significantly improving overall server performance.

Cloud-based  email archiving solutions address all of these needs and more. Typically a fraction of the cost of on-premise systems, cloud-based email archiving is budget friendly with a per mailbox, per month pricing structure. Plus, there is no need for expensive hardware or software purchases, and with a fully managed archiving solution, your IT staff can focus on other important business objectives rather than maintaining the systems necessary to run it.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or how many employees you have—if you aren’t archiving, you are at risk of facing legal sanctions or huge e-discovery costs, losing valuable data or running out of storage space. By providing a secure, searchable and centralized repository for email, an archive can address the full range of storage, legal, regulatory and business challenges.

Here are some tips when moving your email to the cloud:

1.    Choose the proper security measures which best fits your need.

While email security was once only available via on-premise software or an appliance, the industry has evolved and several good email security solutions are now delivered through the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Opting for the SaaS delivery model offers a variety of benefits. Organizations don’t have to install any hardware or software to run the service, and the update and maintenance processes are automatic and included in a flat per user, per month fee.

Companies moving their email to the cloud often find that the email provider offers a built-in email security solution. However, some hosted providers let you select your own security solutions, so it’s smart to understand your options. Whichever solution you select, make sure it includes at least some or all of the functionality mentioned below:

  • Spam filtering: A set of security measures that help to reduce the amount of spam that enters email inboxes.
  • Advanced spam blocking: “Intelligent” filtering features that use Bayesian analysis and other system algorithms to block spam messages.
  • Virus and worm scanning: Blocks viruses and worms (self-replicating programs) from harming your network.
  • Content and attachment filtering: Scans the content of emails and their attachments to ensure they are free of dangerous content.
  • Phishing/fraud protection: Thwarts attempts by hackers to secure sensitive information such as passwords and credit card details from recipients.
  • Email/Denial-of-service (DoS) attack protection: Minimizes the risk of catastrophic attacks that can render entire networks unavailable.
  • Outbound message filtering: Ensures the safety of messages as they leave your network and prevents harmful messages from being sent via your network.
  • Quarantining: Provides a temporary storage location for messages that are identified as spam and that should not be delivered to a user mailbox inside the organization. This feature also stores “false positive” messages so that users can retrieve and whitelist them, if necessary.
  • Real-time monitoring: Ensures that your network is protected around-the-clock since attacks can occur at any time.
  • Reporting: Provides the administrator with reports of the spam filtering and activity taking place.
  • Policy-based encryption: Automatically encrypts sensitive information prior to transmission so that it cannot be read if intercepted.

2.    For huge volumes, choose a proper third-party archiving solution

In many cases, you may need a more robust email archiving solution than the one being offered by your cloud email provider. However, only a select few third-party email archiving solutions will seamlessly integrate with your chosen cloud-based email solution so choose carefully. You want to make sure your solution meets key business requirements.

  • Compliance – meet the strictest regulatory requirements.
  • Continuity – keep your business running in the event of a disaster or unplanned downtime.
  • Flexibility – easily move to another email service provider in the future.

 

3.    Consider unified communications for seamless email response

Unified communications solutions offer a variety of services that can help workers better connect within and outside their organization. So while you are thinking about putting email – the ultimate collaboration tool – into the cloud, it may also make sense to evaluate your unified communications needs. Below are some resources that you may find useful during your evaluation and decision process. Most unified communications solutions include some or all of the components listed below:

  • Presence: Provides real-time notification of users’ current availability and ability to communicate.
  • Instant messaging: Enterprise IM systems offer security and privacy that public services cannot duplicate.
  • Unified messaging: The integration of voice, fax, email messages and message notification. Unified messaging enables users to access these messages from anywhere, anytime.
  • Speech access and personal assistant: Through speech commands, virtual assistants allow users to access their inbox, calendar, directory, etc.
  • Audio conferencing: Enables real-time collaboration via audio.
  • Web conferencing: Enables real-time collaboration via the Web.
  • Video conferencing: Enables real-time collaboration via video conferencing.
  • Collaboration tools: Provides users with shared workspaces, whiteboarding, file sharing and document sharing.
  • Mobility: Connects unified communications solutions to mobile wireless devices. Enables mobile users to participate in and access unified communications components when out-of-pocket.
  • Business process integration: Integration with business processes and workflow applications.

 

4.    Make note of some disadvantages

There are also some issues or obstacles to cloud computing. An Internet connection is obviously necessary to take full advantage of a cloud service. When you’re offline–or if there are any disruptions with the cloud service itself–the data may not be accessible at all. Some cloud apps, like Gmail, have offline capability, while most others, like Mint, require an Internet connection. This simply means that if you access your archived email on the cloud, you cannot do it without an internet signal. It is good to make note of this as this will affect your accessibility.

5.    Limited number of recipients for a single email

Maybe you cannot do all at once, or in a day with iCloud Mail. Like practically all email services, iCloud Mail does limit the number of recipients you can add to a single email message; in addition, it will not let you send an infinite number of emails with but few people in the To:, Cc: and Bcc: fields either and limits the total number of recipients (across all the emails you send) per day as well.

  • iCloud Mail Recipient Limits per Message and Day
  • iCloud Mail allows you to address emails to up to 100 recipients per message and up to 1,000 recipients per day across up to 200 messages per day.
  • You can send 10 emails to 100 people each in a day, for example, or 198 messages with, on average, 5 recipients