The Future of Enterprise Messaging

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Today more than ever, enterprises rely on email for business-critical operations. To the dismay of many IT executives, current generations of email security appliances were designed as point solutions to solve the one-off problems that affected email from the past decade-like spam filtering, virus protection or routing email. They’re finding most solutions weren’t designed with the forward-thinking necessary to process today’s large volumes of messages for business and service applications, which now include everything from automatic statement delivery to having smart household appliances automatically send messages to customer support centers when problems arise.

As a result, many cost-conscious IT organizations are gravitating away from costly point solutions toward a single messaging infrastructure platform capable of addressing the new complexities of today’s messaging application needs.

With this in mind, IT executives should take the time to consider what else lies ahead for the future of enterprise messaging to make informed decisions about how to modernize their messaging infrastructures, and reduce IT costs down the road.

Some of the key trends to consider when evaluating their enterprise messaging include customizable email architectures, cloud computing, virtualization and encryption. Here’s why:

Customizable Email Architectures: When it comes to a messaging infrastructure platform, IT professionals need a simple solution to reduce costs by easily adding functionality without deploying separate, and costly, point products from multiple vendors. With a customizable email architecture, enterprises can select messaging applications of their choice as add-on options to the messaging infrastructure. This new approach frees enterprises from having to implement specialized stand-alone email products, while enabling them to seamlessly implement all corporate policies for both inbound and outbound messages.

Cloud Computing: With IT cost-cutting initiatives continuing to drive increased demand for cloud services, many IT professionals will consider moving their messaging infrastructure to the cloud. However, migrating an entire messaging infrastructure has proven difficult for most enterprises to date. Despite the many cost-saving benefits cloud computing promises, numbers of underlying security issues exist that need to be considered before outsourcing this area of IT infrastructure to the cloud.

To realize the potential benefits of cloud computing while avoiding the pitfalls, enterprises should adopt a hybrid approach—migrating only certain components of the messaging infrastructure, such as mail filtering, to the cloud and continuing to control the internal layer.

Virtualization: As IT virtualization continues to grow over the next several years as a cost-savings measure, IT professionals should consider modernizing their messaging infrastructures with a virtual message processing platform to further reduce capital and operating expenses associated with enterprise messaging.

Encryption: With greater regulatory requirements and stronger corporate security policies in place, the need to provide confidentiality of sensitive information is increasing, and driving demand for secure messaging solutions. As a result, IT professionals should implement an automated, policy-driven messaging architecture to enforce encryption-based security policies and reduce dependence on end-users for determining what should or shouldn’t be encrypted.

In closing, it’s important to note that as enterprise messaging needs continue to evolve and the trends toward customizable email architectures, cloud computing, virtualization and encryption continue to shape the market, IT professionals can benefit the most by deploying a modernized messaging infrastructure platform that allows them to add applications that solve the one-off issues, such as Anti-spam, Anti-Virus, DKM, etc., based on their specific messaging needs. In doing so, not only will they have a lot more control over the applications that make the most sense for their messaging needs but they’ll have the ability to easily add applications as their messaging requirements change now and into the future in order to reduce operating expenses, increase efficiencies and save money down the road.

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About Donald J. Massaro
Donald Massaro brings more than 30 years of success building and managing both public and privately-held technology companies. He is responsible for strategic planning and execution, and corporate leadership to establish Sendmail as a market leader in the emerging content security market.
Most recently, he held the position of CEO and co-founder at Reconnex Corporation, a provider of content-monitoring security appliances.