| | November 20168CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONConverting the AWS Pricing Model for Enterprises: How Business Email Breaks the MoldThe Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure has aided over a million businesses in making the shift from hosting the services they need on-premises to using cloud-based infrastructure. It's proven so effective in providing infrastructure for such a broad array of services that customers have been decommissioning entire data centers in favor of AWS. However, AWS pricing is not ideal for the use case of business email.Under the AWS pricing model, customers pay based on their utilization of the AWS infrastructure. IT is in control of a company's usage, requiring customers to be able to predict the compute, storage and other infrastructure required for a given workload. This allows customers to finely calibrate the amount of infrastructure used to match the demand on applications. Customers even have the ability to further control costs by adjusting their infrastructure on an hour-by-hour basis, increasing and decreasing capacity to meet end-user demand. While this approach works well for many applications, it doesn't work well for business email, especially for Microsoft® Exchange, the most popular business email system.In the following, we'll explain why running Microsoft Exchange in the cloud is so challenging, and then present an approach to business email for enterprises to consider as they look to eliminate their data centers.Why the Cloud?Because AWS charges for infrastructure based on usage-per-hour, customers can reap large benefits in several areas. In traditional data centers, the many weeks that are required to select, purchase, install and configure new servers means that data center operators need to buy enough equipment to handle peak loads. Under-provisioning a data center risks system slowdowns or even system failures during the most critical, heavy-By Jonathan Levine, CTO, IntermediaS3STORAGESTORAGESTORAGES3S3
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