Should you move you email to "the cloud"?

A report from Forrester Research (outlined in this ReadWriteWeb post) suggests that for most enterprises, hosting email with Google is the cheapest option available. In general, outsourcing your email, and putting it into "the cloud" is most likely going to be more cost effective than hosting it yourself.

As nonprofit organizations look to trim budgets in this coming tough climate, is this the time to outsource email? Outsourcing email saves you from buying new servers, paying for Exchange seats, worrying about spam filtering, etc.

So what are the downsides? The downsides come from the basic fact that your email is not really in your total control anymore. If you are using something like GMail, you need to find a way to back it up. You can use a mail client like Outlook or Apple Mail, which loads a copy of the email locally. There are other ways to back up Gmail if you want to stick to using the web client.

For some organizations that do sensitive work (Chinese democracy activists for example, or anarchists and the like) using a service like GMail is a security risk - if Google or most providers are asked to hand over information, you can bet they will, since it is in their best interest to do so, not to fight a government. If your organization runs the risk of coming to the attention of the powers that be, GMail or a service like it is probably not a good option. Nor is it a good option if you need to share confidential client information.

However, there are good nonprofit-focused email/hosting providers, like May First/People Link, or Electric Embers, that can be much more secure places to keep sensitive data, since they are smaller, and work with a lot of activist groups.

If you make a careful choice, and make sure you've got backup plans, outsourcing email could be a good money saver during this time of trimming budgets.