With the increasing use of email comes an increase in spam. Spam accounts for 75% to 95% of the email received by typical corporate email servers.

The best defense against spam is to stop it before it even hits your mail servers. A typical corporation spends $7 to $11 per user, per month just to fight spam. This cost to detect and eliminate spam includes maintaining spam filter policies, software upgrades, and infrastructure.

With cloud-based email, this service is included in the subscription fee. Not only do you get spam-blocking, but many providers include virus scanning as part of the solution.
Cloud email providers usually have much better spam-blocking and virus scanning technologies than could be implemented in your local infrastructure. Many providers, like Google’s Postini, even have SLAs on response time to new virus signatures.

Email archiving has become essential with the rising importance of emails as valuable business records. Many organizations have email back-up policies, but they do not archive emails. There is a big difference between backing-up and true archiving.

When the time comes to find the right email that has been sitting on a backup tape, it can cost significant time and resources to retrieve it. Archiving, on other hand, provides an automated way to archive certain emails to different hardware that can be accessed in exactly the same way as your inbox.

Superior search capability helps find the right email even if it is in an archive. Moreover, you can set archiving policies that prevent end-user from changing the contents of archived emails.

Privacy and Control In Cloud Email

Yet another advantage of cloud-based email centers on the issue of privacy and control.

Many businesses that are looking into moving their email to the cloud have concerns about privacy and control. These concerns are legitimate, especially since email contains sensitive information and emails are often considered business records for legal and regulatory purposes.

If you share these concerns, there are solutions available using a cloud email provider but hosting the solution on a private cloud.

CSC delivers the best-of-both-worlds by using an e-mail solution like Yahoo Zimbra to achieve the cost benefits and features of cloud based email while hosting the solution on a private cloud, giving you privacy and control of data.

Stay tuned for another post on could-based email, in which I’ll discuss more of its benefits.

Does your inbox fill up with spam? Would you move your organization’s email to the cloud if you could be assured of privacy and control?

Let us know how CSC can answer your questions about email in the cloud.

Pravin Sapre is Director of Applications and Technology Services in the Managed Services Sector at CSC. Follow him on Twitter @saprep