American Health Care Association’s Move to Cloud-Based Email

Why move to the cloud?

Three factors: cost, mobility, and security.

How did security factor in?

Security should be of general concern to CIOs, and cloud computing does nothing to change that. Any organization investing in infrastructure needs to ensure due diligence in terms of security, whether the infrastructure be on the premises or cloud-based. Cloud infrastructure provides a level of security beyond the capability of on-premises deployment. This is especially true for associations because there are a number of specialist services that cloud providers can offer, due to their [lower] cost or complexity, that would generally be unavailable in traditional infrastructure situations.

What would you tell other CIOs about moving email to the cloud?

Mail is the life and blood of every person who works now, so it’s so critical that you don’t get it wrong.

It’s the most stressful kind of conversion or upgrade you’re ever going to go through, but I know my IT director is happy to not have to install, manage, patch, or upgrade our servers anymore. It’s nice to have somebody else take care of all of that so we could focus more on strategic things associated with our business.

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