Cut The Fat With Google Business Apps And Microsoft Online Services
Consider the cost involved with upgrading an email system for the company with a thousand mailboxes. Add up software, storage, servers, engineering and days [or weeks] of implementation, well, you’re staring down a bill close to $150K or more. On top of that add recurring maintenance, disaster recovery, and sys admin — you’re looking at almost doubling costs in the first year alone.
Then, you’re married to this system for 5 to 7 years. [Same goes for corporate productivity software like word processors, company portals, IM and so on.]
So cut the fat and save some cash. Take a peek at the SaaS offerings out there (Software as a Service). They’re pay-as-you-go hosted apps minus the surrounding sys admin needs. In other words — store, manage and serve your company’s software in ‘the cloud‘ with someone else’s equipment – and staff.
Contemplating SaaS, Rob Howard (CEO and Founder of Telligent — a leader in providing solutions for online communities) blogs:
“A couple folks have been pushing us to look at Google’s corporate email options. There seems to be a lot of benefit and it’s only $50/year. At $5,000/year it is much, much less than we spend right now and I really like the idea of freeing up our IT team and the servers.”
Telligent say they have 100+ on staff. But imagine the cost savings across a company of 1000.
Let’s do the math: On-site implementation of Microsoft Exchange at $150K, plus $50K/year sys admin, plus $25K in disaster recovery. Amortize that over -say- a 5-year life cycle and you face a bill for $85K/year. Compare that to $50K/year for 1000 hosted mailboxes and zero sys admin / procurement headaches.
With SaaS, we’re not talking about generic webmail accounts either — like Hotmail, AOL, or GMail. SaaS is more on the lines of a managed service through providers such as Google Apps, Microsoft Online Services and a jillion other reputable vendors who serve up not just email, but also the other business apps I mentioned earlier.
SaaS maturity with compliance and up-time is fairly solid as well — not too much in the way of news related to SaaS breaches and failures.
And, you know SaaS is cool when even MTV puts their company portal on a hosted Microsoft SharePoint solution. MTV using Microsoft? Who would’ve dreamt it. I want my MTV!
The only problem I see especially in with Government entities is security in the cloud.
Something on DOD scale could better use their own cloud — not something on a public network. New biz opp? Or already being planned / implemented….
DISA already has a so-called "cloud computing" environment called the DECC – Defense Enterprise Computing Centers. You can basically have resources carved out for your use for a nominal fee. But as with most thing DISA, it remains in the early stages of development, is unstable, has low quality performance and it being funded by the very users who use it – ergo, the DECC is not a proven performer yet.
Methinks Amazon should have made a bid for such a service because their cloud computing offering is exceptional. Imagine if DoD had something similar to what Amazon has done – commands would jump on it.
But alas, as the cliche goes – you cant spell disaster without DISA. The DECC will take years before it's a viable alternative for local computing.