A quick thought or two about email outsourcing
I enjoyed Karine’s article in University Business magazine about schools that are outsourcing email services to Microsoft and Google. I’d love for my institution to outsource our email to Gmail. From a systems management and infrastructure standpoint, it would really free up not only server time and bandwidth, but also staff time in having to maintain, keep up and grow email solutions.
After reading the article, I have a few thoughts to throw out there about outsourced email.
At my institution, we have a terrible webmail solution at the moment and I think these outsourced solutions offer a much more usable interface and feature set then many web mail solutions, including some open-source products.
Secondly, since you can connect to Gmail through POP or IMAP, conceivably the switch to an outsourced provider would be transparent for many of your on-campus users, such as faculty, staff and administration. They could continue to use the email client of their choice and access Gmail and it’s storage space and spam filtering. They could continue on business as usual and not have to learn an entire new interface if they didn’t want to.
Third: one other thing to think about outsourcing email is the mobile strategy part. Yes, Gmail can be accessed by web browser, POP and IMAP but Gmail also has specialized clients and access for Blackberrys, Palms, and iPhones. This would mean that IT departments wouldn’t have to run BES or some other setup if they didn’t want to, and connecting the phones to the user’s existing Gmail account would be much easier then it sometimes currently is. I can imagine this would be of great relief to IT staff in many schools.
In the article, Karine mentions that schools will have to think about the bandwidth usage. She says:
Moving thousands of e-mail accounts from a local network to the internet will also have some impact on bandwidth usage–especially if students start to use heavily the other collaboration features also offered for documents, photos, events, and more. The resulting higher demand might not be a showstopper, depending on the institution, but it will definitely need to be factored into the equation.
Actually, it might be a wash in the end. Why? The answer could be spam.
Barracuda Networks released a report at the end of last year that said 95% of all email sent in 2007 was spam. That unending barrage of bits eats up a large part of the bandwidth at any company or IHE (not to mention processing cycles), and by moving that to someone else’s pipe, the load may be reduced to the point that it might not have as strong an impact as expected.
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to colleges outsourcing services. I was talking with Karine and Mark Greenfield at EduWeb about this and Mark mentioned that the university datacenter in 20 years may be very different but I think you’ll see major changes in just five years, especially as cloud technologies mature. Today it’s email and web sites, but soon it will be backups, your CRM solution, ERP, BI and a bunch of other services.
Could the university data center of the future look like this?
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