December 11, 2013

Know Why Cloud Email Services Are More Preferred Over Corporate Emails

By CloudTweaks

Know Why Cloud Email Services are More Preferred over Corporate Emails

Emails have been an integral part of our lives since the advent of the internet era. However with the influx of consumerization, enterprises are witnessing a gradual process of being affected by user’s personal email accounts. And it is not just email forwarding that is to be blamed, with cloud computing and email coming together; Cloud email services too comprise of security, malware and encryption concerns.

UNDERSTANDING CLOUD EMAIL SERVICE SECURITY

As it mostly happens, free and easily accessible cloud email services like Gmail are extensively used many a times than most corporate email in workplaces by employees to forward work emails to personal email accounts in the cloud. Such messages are usually not encrypted, thus putting the network at risk for Malware infection. This leads to heightened risk of cloud email services being misused at Workplace.

But why do employees prefer to use cloud email services than corporate emails?

Well, one of the key reasons employees forward work emails to personal accounts is that free cloud email services usually have higher attachment limits than those for corporate email systems. This makes it easier to share files from a personal cloud email account than from a corporate one. The way Gmail cloud services work is fairly simple.

When a user attaches a file that is larger than 25 MB, Google encourages the user to upload that file to its Google Drive cloud service. Then Gmail puts a link to that file in the email instead of the file itself. Even MS Outlook offers this functionality, as you can have add-ins to convert attachments to a URL that points to a cloud service.

IT teams in organizations can stop email forwarding by putting cloud and mobility policies in place, even though many users will still take advantage of what cloud email services have to offer. In such cases, you may consider easing your inbox and attachment restrictions in your corporate email account.

BENEFITS OF CLOUD EMAIL SERVICES

Even though the functional benefits of cloud-based e-mail are limitless, there are several opportunities for organizations so as to take advantage of a cloud-based option; including financial benefits.

  • Cloud Email requires no upgrading, add-on installation, or patching. E-mail requires uninterrupted uptime. Therefore, by removing some of the tasks that often demand shutdowns and sometimes cause unexpected issues like crashes; you abandon some of the most challenging issues that continue to torment email administrators.
  • Experience scalable and well-distributed resources. Even though the ability to scale and distribute compute resources isn’t a daunting task when it comes to cloud computing, the ability to scale and evenly distribute resources across hundreds of thousands of users (when it comes to such a resource intensive system like email) turn out to be that much more overstated. For Instance, with most email cloud providers like Google (with its Gmail product), the distribution of users based upon the volatility of a user population is a child’s play, as resources are automatically dispensed by the provider itself.
  • Cloud Email services allows you to turn a variable expense into fixed one. Many a times it is seen that the ability to gain financial transparency can be reason alone to move your email to the cloud. Additionally, by eliminating the debt liability i.e. email, or the on-premise assets that are a context of it, a Company can release capital on their balance sheet, and consequently spread the expense over time.

PROMINENT CLOUD EMAIL SERVICES

Cloud Email Services: Gmail

Gmail is undoubtedly the most popular SMB cloud-hosted email solution. Not only does it offer the ability to customize your email address, it also comes loaded with 30 GB of storage per account for everything associated to that email address – including calendar, pictures, documents, instant messaging and email.

Besides offering 24/7 customer support, Gmail comes with 99.9 percent uptime, strong security and compatibility with most desktop clients. Available at $50/year standard, Gmail also offers Vault at a higher price of $10/month. Vault features email discovery, email and chat archiving, legal holds, and the ability to run audits as well.

Moreover, Cloud storage is available for Google’s services – Gmail, Google Drive and Google+, combining which, users can have access to 15 GB of free storage. This they can tentatively use for their emails, Google documents and photos on the Google+ social network.

Cloud Email Services: ZohoMail

ZohoMail that shares many of Gmail’s features, is available for free or at $24-$36/year (inclusive of all kinds of free and paid add-on services). However, compared to Gmail ZohoMail has less storage space to offer. Considered to be one of the most enticing email options, ZohoMail is built precisely for businesses.

Besides providing over 30 different services (which includes many free services as well – for up to a certain number of users) —it indeed beats Gmail and Outlook with dedicated CRM tools, wiki, an invoice service, and many more web applications – and most interestingly all integrated with your Zoho account.

Cloud Email Services: Outlook/Office 365

Microsoft Outlook, a name synonymous to Email for many, thanks to its familiarity it in a way offers comfort of use. Outlook/Office 365 services starting at $5/month and above includes 25 GB of storage space.With both services you get the lite browser-based version of the MS office suite.

As expected, Office 365 has 99.9 percent uptime, 24/7 customer support, and interestingly both services allow you to use a custom email address. Moreover, Microsoft provides excellent spam filtering for Outlook and it’s easy to sync to mobile phones including iOS, Windows Phone and Android.

But the BIG question remains, is social media killing email?

Experts believe emails cannot die. In fact, it is just the changing face of social media and collaboration tools that are diluting the dominance of email to some extent. Although social media triumphs as one of the fastest means of garnering response and catering to a larger cross-section of your audience at a time; email is undeniably the most reliable way to foster one-on-one communication besides allowing file attachment. Moreover, cloud email services remain the finest tool for collaboration, document capture, calendaring, marketing and customer support.

Have you integrated cloud email services for your business?

By Hariot Mills,

Hariot is an app developer for VitebMobileApps, a mobile application development company offering mobile solutions to clients across the world. She also loves to write on the latest happenings in the mobile technology industry, specifically related to iOS application development.

CloudTweaks

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