How to Ensure a Successful Hybrid Cloud Enterprise Email Deployment

Although we cover hybrid clouds frequently, what we don’t often discuss is how email can be run optimally inside a hybrid system.

If you are moving to hybrid for redundancy and disaster recovery, then build the architecture and business rules accordingly. Select the appropriate cloud email delivery provider for your needs; having an on-premises email infrastructure means that you might already have your marketing tools (such as campaign management/segmentation/list management) in-house. If this is the case, using an enterprise service provider for cloud delivery might be overkill because you would be paying for these additional services that you don’t need and would not be utilizing.

Offloading deliverability to experts in the industry who live and breathe these rules day in and day out allows you to focus on your core business activities. Because they are experts, you get more mail delivered to the inbox—which can translate to higher conversions and greater revenue.

It does not make sense to expand your hardware footprint to support one-off bursts in demand, either unpredictable bursts or seasonal spikes, when this could mean additional long-term investment that might then remain idle. Adding an easily expandable/elastic cloud service absorbs these demands for more volume as needed.

Having two active sending environments automatically gives redundancy, should one of them fail. Depending on how it’s architected, failover could be automatic or manually initiated. For emails that are extremely time-sensitive where network/latency could be an issue, you can use your own private environment where connectivity can be controlled using quality of service (QoS), and send the rest using the cloud.

Your on-premises email infrastructure will likely have its reporting and analytics capability, as will your cloud delivery provider. You will need to determine which tool best serves your user and standardize on that. This means that in order to see the complete picture of your email program’s deliverability and engagement performance, you will need to consolidate data from both systems before you can report on it using your preferred tool.

Data must flow cleanly between on-premises mail transfer agent (MTA) and the cloud in an efficient manner to deliver the elasticity in on-demand capability when needed. However, you must ensure that the connection between the two provides adequate security for confidentiality of data flow, user access and application interaction.

Ensure that the cloud provider you select has established service-level agreements (SLAs) and adequate resources that can be allocated to you when needed to meet your peak time sending rates. Additionally, availability of computing and storage services, durability of data and prices should be defined in SLAs.

Finally, if your company has security concerns with data in the cloud or needs to be in compliance in highly regulated industries, you can store sensitive data within your internally managed sending mechanism, while allowing less-sensitive data to get sent out through the cloud environment.