Email: Complexity is Costly!

Published Monday, 29 June 2009 | Category: Operations | Posted by Maxwell Ramutla

email-complexity

Business and individuals today view email as a core communication tool that no one can effectively communicate without. I have identified a large amount of businesses that built and run their email infrastructure without carefully taking into consideration the amount of complexity they are introducing in their operations.

Let’s take a simple example in a company named NewCo (Pty) Ltd. NewCo has 100 staff members who use computers to fulfil their roles in the company. The IT Manager of NewCo, John More, will have to consider a number of business requirements and features for the email service to add value in the lives and work of the staff.

In providing its email service to its staff, John will have to take into consideration the following key requirements:

1. A Solution to deal with current and emerging threat of viruses, spyware, malware and other security threats;

2. Bi-directional scalability that caters for any change in staffing and service usage including possible increase and decrease in staffing, on demand;

3. Availability that practically caters for any form of service failure in line with the Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity needs for the business;

4. Long term storage of all email communication by the company including all inbound, outbound and internal email messages including immediate retrieval of emails, on demand;

5. The compliance aspects of the law must also be taken into account, this is applicable to all enterprises and government operating in South Africa, for purposes of NewCo;

6. Email must be available to all staff through alternative means for convenience, i.e. Web Based email (Outlook Web Access – OWA) without the need for VPN access or email delivered to mobile devices including those commonly used such as Symbian and Windows mobile;

7. Capital expenditure required in procuring hardware and software required for the service to meet business needs;

8. The Skills required to implement the new messaging system, and operational support that will manage the system throughout its life-cycle to meet business uptime service levels;

9. Integration to NewCo’s existing operating environment with minimal impact on current IT operations;

10. Branding of emails in line with NewCo corporate identity and the ability to produce reporting on the effectiveness of the branding/marketing.

These are only some of the areas that every business must consider in provisioning email services to their users. It is pretty much an obvious case that the cost associated to these features would in most cases outweigh the benefits in the short term. The resources in initial funding or capital expense of any solution is only one aspect, the other is the operational costs associated with the solution that must encompass a great deal of risk management.
If John was to consider email as a service, he would instantly have all these features above together with the guarantee of availability and scalability. John’s financial director will be impressed with the financial predictability that he desires in the current and foreseeable economic environment.

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