You can't afford to ignore email archiving, security, internal policy or regulatory requirements, but can you afford to keep paying for it as multiple systems on top of your email system? When you add up the full price tag for your email environment, from server to soft ware to risk management and staff costs, it becomes clear why running everything in-house can mean you spend far more of your budget on maintenance than innovation.
AMIMECASTGUIDE
THETOTALCOSTOFEMAIL
PUTTINGAPRICETAGONYOUREMAILENVIRONMENT
Youcan'taffordtoignoreemailarchiving,security,internalpolicyorregulatoryrequirements,butcanyouaffordtokeeppayingforitasmultiplesystemsontopofyouremailsystem?Whenyouaddupthefullpricetagforyouremailenvironment,fromservertosoftwaretoriskmanagementandstaffcosts,itbecomesclearwhyrunningeverythingin-housecanmeanyouspendfarmoreofyourbudgetonmaintenancethaninnovation.Calculating the true cost of email
Your IT budget is probably going to be reviewed over the next year; now is the time to look at where you can make savings without making compromises. To do that, you need to understand exactly how much your current infrastructure is costing you for services that may not add competitive advantage to your business - and to consider how key applications can be charged back to the rest of the business, if that's an option. Email is often taken for granted, with senior executives simply seeing email flow to-and-from the organization without any understanding of the complexity involved. Ensuring email is always free from spam or malware and that it is not a vector for social engineering attacks or leakage of confidential data is as critical as making a permanent record for compliance or litigation protection. The growth of mobile messaging devices now means that working hours are no longer 9 to 5 as users will often check email in the evening or at weekends, leading to an increasingly low tolerance of any form of downtime. Organizations have tended to add to their email infrastructure in an organic fashion as new threats or regulatory requirements have arrived. They very rarely step back and analyze the total cost to the business of running their email.Understanding how much your current email system costs, and how that all adds up, is the key to making changes, and to providing a better service for your users. It is only when you understand the risks your organization faces and the costs of your mitigation products that you can perform a true cost-benefit analysis. And breaking out the costs of a typical mail solution can be quite surprising - especially when it's a business critical service that is taken for granted, which the IT department is paying for. It's not just the initial capital costs that are an issue; it's also the ongoing operational expenses. Although industry estimates that the cost of managing any on-premise software can be up to four times the initial purchase price, for email storage it's closer to seven-to-one. A complex and fragmented environment also introduces risk, and risk has a financial impact on the organization in the event of failure. Upfront capital investment If you're using a virtual infrastructure you'll Many of the costs of your email infrastructure need to be sure you have appropriate resources are sunk costs, especially the initial capital in your compute fabric that can be prioritized for outlay of buying the appropriate hardware. email, along with the right virtualized storage Few businesses can cope with a single email technologies. Adding extra servers or rolling out server and adding policy management, archiving upgrades takes time; time that key IT staff could and risk management tools means adding be spending on more strategic projects and time systems to run them on. Email is increasingly a that delays the ROI of the project. Plus you'll business critical service with low user tolerance have to budget overtime costs for migrating for outage, so an email server may need to between mail servers out of business hours, be clustered, or even set up to work over a as any downtime could severely impact existing WAN connection to a disaster recovery centre. business processes, and affect business revenues.Consider that risk management and regulatory High as they are, hardware costs are only requirements don't diminish in a failover a small part of the bill for running your email situation, so a large number of the additional environment. Software adds further burdens services around the email server itself will also to strained budgets, not just for the email need to be clustered using their own high- server software and client licences, but for the availability configuration. Failover hardware overlapping patchwork of risk management needs to be part of any implementation - and... [download for more]
