News

Survey Investigates Moving Apps to AWS Cloud

• By David Ramel
• 04/20/2016

E-mail was front and center in a new survey published by Intermedia to investigate what applications are being migrated to the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

The goal of the new survey -- IaaS Outlook Managing and Migrating Business Applications in the Cloud -- was "to better understand the migration of applications to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for those in or considering the AWS platform," said Intermedia.

The company describes itself as "a one-stop shop for cloud business applications," offering an Office in the Cloud software suite and a Dedicated Exchange on AWS e-mail solution. The company commissioned Researchscape International to survey more than 300 U.S. IT managers in mid-sized organizations (400 to 11,999 employees) that were using or intending to use AWS. Intermedia announced the survey from the AWS summit underway in Chicago.

"The results were rather surprising -- like the fact that e-mail was the least commonly hosted application on IaaS at only 32 percent," said Intermedia's Carles Cabre in a blog post on Monday. "However, when it comes to apps that organizations plan on moving to IaaS in the future, e-mail ranks as the highest (32 percent, +6 delta)."

While e-mail was the least likely application to be hosted on the AWS cloud, the most likely ones were ERP (44 percent), file synchronization and sharing (40 percent), and server backup (38 percent). ERP was also tied with e-mail for planned delivery to AWS, while CRM and file synchronization ranked at the bottom of that category.

Security was overwhelmingly cited as the No. 1 challenge in migrating e-mail to the cloud, with data migration far behind in the No. 2 slot.

"The concerns about migrating e-mail to the cloud are similar to concerns about migrating applications in general," the 39 page survey said. "Security is the number one concern of IT managers for moving applications to the cloud, regardless of the type of application. Data migration is the No. 2 concern overall, as it is for e-mail, but the No. 3 general concern is total cost of ownership (TCO). TCO ranks much lower as a challenge for migrating e-mail to the cloud (No. 6 vs. No. 3 overall)."

The survey said the increased interest in moving e-mail to the cloud resulted from the evolution of IaaS offerings such that those oft-cited challenges can finally be addressed. Intermedia said those challenges can be overcome by dedicated, single-tenant cloud deployments, in which respondents expressed great interest -- and which the company offers.

The survey also indicated many respondents prefer per-user, per-month, pricing -- which the company offers.

Also, a majority of IT managers (59 percent) expressed confidence in their organization's ability to manage its own Exchange e-mail environment on AWS, but they still favored working with a third party -- like Intermedia -- and would want a single-tenant deployment on a per-user per-month payment model -- which the company offers.