Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Takes On Microsoft, Google With WorkMail For Businesses
alphadogg writes Amazon Web Services today launched a new product to its expansive service catalog in the cloud: WorkMail is a hosted email platform for enterprises that could wind up as a replacement for Microsoft and Google messaging systems. The service is expected to cost $4 per user per month for a 50GB email inbox. It's integrated with many of AWS's other cloud services too, including its Zocalo file synchronization and sharing platform. The combination will allow IT shops to set up a hosted email platform and link it to a file sharing system.
My top priorities for email service are quality of spam filtering, support for unlimited aliases, search, and rules. I think labels work better than folders for categorization. I have not found any Amazon documentation which addresses these issues.
My top priority is privacy.
Does their service have built-in encryption, such that they cannot decrypt the message contents?
I can do spam filtering, searching, and other rule-based operations on my home system. What I *can't* do locally is prevent others from sticking their noses in my business.
Whether it be my ISP adding ads to the data stream for goods and services I might be interested in, or the website provider tailoring ads for goods and services that might be of interest to me, or my home country looking for perceived criminal activity, or someone *else's* country looking to steal corporate secrets or leverage me into forced compliance, or any of a number of other reasons.
Of late I'm actually pretty interested in the privacy aspect.
How high up on your list of priorities is privacy?
Another Kloud Service. At last my company can have its email scanned and delivered to my competitors. Just what I needed.
Most small businesses are better off entrusting their mail to a cloud provider than to try to run their own email service and trying to keep it secure and highly available.
This is actually by design. Their model is not profit, it's growth and innovation. It's a new economy where the balance sheet is becoming less and less a key factor for large corporations, and for the most part shareholders are ok with it because investments are made in the short term and the skyrocketing share price is more attractive than actual equity or dividends.
I'm not saying I agree, just that this is not by mistake that they don't make a profit.
lucm, indeed.