To Build or Buy: Making the Decision
If you’re still struggling with the decision to either build your own email infrastructure or outsource your email management to a third party provider, you are not alone. Developers all around the world are exactly where you are right now. Research organization Uptime Institute conducted its Second Annual Data Center Industry Survey and found some interesting trends among late adopters.
According to Uptime, the top drivers for cloud adoption are:
- Cost reduction (27%)
- Scalability (23%)
- Customer/user demand (13%)
- Speed of deployment (13%)
However, despite all of these benefits, many organizations still opt to build and maintain on-premise servers despite the challenges they present. According to the survey:
- 80% of the respondents said that their company has either built a new data center or upgraded an existing center in the past five years.
- 30% said that their data center facilities would run out of power, cooling, or space in 2012 alone.
- Only 30% said that given the need to increase capacity in the next 12-18 months, they would look to the cloud for help. The majority instead opted to upgrade or build a new center.
So why are companies still holding onto their in-house solutions? Looking at the data, the majority cite concerns with security (64%) followed by compliance (27%) and reliability (21%). These are all valid concerns that necessitate that your vendor selection process be top notch. To help you evaluate providers, you should do the following:
- Make a comprehensive list of your requirements and compare vendor offerings against your needs.
- Perform a cost analysis to understand the true cost of maintaining your own infrastructure as compared to a hosted solution.
- Review your business objectives. While cost is an important factor, it’s not the only factor in making your decision.
- Review vendor case studies and testimonials and talk to customers about their overall satisfaction.
- Fully vet their tool and their process by testing it out before you commit. Some vendors offer month to month plans while others allow you to test out a small portion of your mailstream.
To learn more about how to decide whether to build or buy, download our new white paper—Should I Build or Should Buy? Understanding Email Infrastructure in the Cloud.
Author: Jillian Wohlfarth
Jillian Wohlfarth is a digital marketing professional with a passion for writing. After spending six years wearing multiple hats in both the corporate and startup world in NYC, she's now churning out engaging thought leadership content at SendGrid.
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