If I were to ask what your number one headache is in your local government technology infrastructure, what would it be? I’m not talking about the current pet project on your plate (that’s usually your number one headache) but the long-term IT issue that just never seems to go away. The one that eats up most of your time and budget but does so in a way that you don’t notice. My vote would be email closely followed by backups.
Considering how important email is to most organizations (okay, everyone!) it perhaps should not be a surprise that it be a big part of the IT department. But in this day of cloud computing and, dare I say, Gmail, is there really a reason to continue supporting your own email infrastructure?
I have spoken to a few people about why they feel the need to host their own email and it all seems to boil down to one reason . . . privacy. That is, if email is hosted by an external agency there are issues around control of private information. The thinking being that if email is hosted internally it is somehow more secure than if it is hosted by someone else. The thinking, of course, is flawed since email still is not, nor has it ever been a secure form of communication. An email is an electronic post-card that is there for all to see unless it is encrypted (I’ll leave the perils of trying to implement email encryption to another blog posting!).
Even if maintaining email in-house provided some level of control over security it certainly does not apply to email that leaves the confines of the local network. Once that email leaves the organization it can go anywhere (including out of the country) before it arrives at its intended destination.
If the argument to maintain email in-house for privacy and security concerns is removed then out-sourcing makes a lot of sense. Email providers are able to provide service at much less cost per user than in-house since the incremental cost of adding users is low and, arguably, the service will be much better. It’s one way to remove one of your biggest headaches in managing a local government IT infrastructure.
