Engineering firm welds email to the cloud

Cloud based email blows away on-premise messaging systems

Weir Valves and Controls UK Ltd is a subsidiary of global engineering giant Weir Power and Industrial, which supplies pump equipment, safety valves and engineering services to companies in the nuclear power, fossil fuel and renewable energy industries.

In April 2008, the company replaced multiple different email platforms installed at eight locations around the world supporting a total of 300 users, including the Trend Micro Scanmail email system at its head office in the UK.

Rather than sticking with an on-premise email platform, Weir followed the advice of analyst firm Gartner and others who have extolled the virtues of cloud based email services and instead adopted Webroot’s Email Security Service, a hosted messaging platform that offers spam and virus scanning to weed out messages containing any malware threat.

Research company Gartner has predicted that email will lead the charge into mainstream adoption of cloud computing, with the cloud-provisioned model championed by Webroot and others growing from one per cent of enterprise seats in 2007 to 20 per cent in 2012.

Last month saw the analyst firm estimate that for some organisations, cloud-based email services can cost as little as $3 (£1.80) per user per month, by comparison with $10 (£6) per user per month for an equivalent on-premise messaging platform, with associated annual storage costs slashed by as much as 85 per cent.

Despite the potential savings, cost was not top of the list when Weir head of IT Dr Phil Myers opted to move the engineering company’s email system into the cloud. Rather, he says, the Trend Micro Scanmail system in use at the UK office where he works was unreliable and difficult to support.

"When I was away in China for ten days, the system fell over and the support we got was inadequate – we lost some email, and that had never happened before, and it was at that point that we decided to switch," said Myers.

This problem was exacerbated because Weir’s international offices routed their mail through the UK email system, meaning if the UK went down, so did the other systems.

"It used to be the case that if our leased line went down nobody had any email because all the remote sites routed their email through us," said Myers.

With the cloud-based Webroot system, if any one individual local area (LAN) or wide area (WAN) network goes down at any of Weir’s locations, Myers knows that only email at that site will be unavailable.

“There are occasional problems where a few filtered messages captured by the previous system have sneaked through and the spam has been blocked completely,” said Myers.

“It has freed up a lot of time for the two guys who supported the previous system, they now have more time to look at other projects,” said Myers. “And we no longer need a man from the vendor support team to come in and work out any issues,” said Myers.

The three-year contract with Webroot actually works out cheaper than using Trend Micro Scanmail, says Myers, even with the cost of support thrown in, though cost reduction was never the primary driver for switching email to the cloud anyway.

“We did not measure return on investment (ROI) but we just could not continue with the situation we had,” he said. “We had one site in China with no internet protection at all, it was unacceptable.”

Webroot offers more than just a secure email platform, though Weir has not chosen to utilise features such as deep content analysis to stop confidential information being transmitted within incoming and outgoing messages, or email encryption.

Big vendors have recognised the opportunity to provide business customers with secure, reliable cloud hosted email services, fuelled partly by worries a bout downtime and the consumer orientated image associated with services such as Google’s Gmail.

IBM launched LotusLive iNotes in October this year, for example, with prices starting at $3 (£1.80) per user per month. And more recently networking giant Cisco used technology acquired with its purchase of email and collaboration software specialist Postpath a year ago to offer secure cloud based enterprise mailboxes with Outlook and Active Sync support for $5 (£3) per user per month.