CIOIN

Gartner has predicted that by the end of 2014, penetration of cloud email and collaboration services (CECS) will stand at 10 percent and will have passed the "tipping point" with broad-scale adoption under way. They do however caution that, at present, the list of reasons to move to CECS is long, as is the list of reasons to avoid it.

Consequently, Gartner has also lowered its short-term projected adoption rate for CECS and its analysts predict that most enterprises will not begin the move to CECS until 2014 when growth in the market will take off, before leveling off in 2020 as it exceeds 55 percent. “For the smaller organizations the list of drivers for CECS adoption is much higher than the inhibitors,” says Sid Deshpande, Senior Research Analyst, Gartner. “The benefit on cost and the reliability and security that they would get on a CECS platform would be comparatively high,” he adds.

This segment need not be circumspect of early adoption as CECS appear to be forward priced and, while Gartner does expect the cost of CECS to follow a cost-learning curve, the motive for much of the investment in CECS appears to be cost reduction. “There is not much of an early adopter premium that needs to be paid for CECS today,” says Deshpande. Even among enterprises that have adopted CECS appear to have moved everyone to CECS, closer investigation reveals that they often retain small, dedicated, on-premises systems to maintain greater control over the content created and consumed by C-level executives.  

“A lot of large enterprises were not sitting and waiting for cloud e-mail to come about. They have already have investments with regards to e-mail and they need to delve deeper into the security, compliance and regulatory implications of the move,” says Deshpande. “But if you are sitting on older systems that need to be upgraded then CECS should be a consideration instead of refurbishing the entire hardware and renewing the software licenses,” he adds. CIOs in the meanwhile need to create a timeline of their strategy and decide when and to what measure they want to move onto the cloud platform.