Are you running an organization where your Microsoft Exchange servers are considered mission critical? After all, Exchange is one of the most used “filing cabinets” in today’s office, where meetings are scheduled, documents are shared and business is conducted. How much would you lose in productivity and revenue if even one of your servers went down? Moreover, that same “filing cabinet” has to be accessible for legal reasons, thanks to Section 802 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires the retention of auditing information – including email – for a period of seven years.
Private and public clouds evolve the way IT services are delivered to the business. The promise of increased efficiency and agility of enterprise-class applications and services is intriguing, but enterprise customers are struggling with how cloud services can safely add realistic business value. The use of external cloud services challenge security and compliance, as well as service level management, which can involve multiple domains of control. Technology lock-in is an additional concern as various vendors deliver very different cloud computing offerings (and there are others of which you should be aware). The reality is that external cloud services are still working toward enterprise maturity.