BANGALORE, INDIA: Until recently, most IT managers used to have jitters on moving their business applications like CRM onto the cloud mostly because of the security concerns for their information. Therefore they took pride in having all their business applications, email architecture, storage setup, etc within their company's firewall.

But in recent past the economic slowdown and the onset of cloud service providers has been an awakening that organizations can reduce their infrastructures' complexities by opting to host their applications on the cloud.

Today's business applications are growing in number and complexity, and are also demanding on the IT setup requirements. An organization which is hosting their business applications on-premise will have to first invest on the infrastructure to run that, and then would have to have appropriate manpower having expertise in supporting those applications as well as the IT infrastructure.

On the contrary, the same service can be obtained from a cloud service provider with no such hassles. The benefits of opting for a service model to on-premise setup are already known. And the cloud service vendors today have established their setup so well for reliability and security which one cannot replicate in their on-premise infrastructure without having to dig deep into their pockets.

Here are few business critical applications that an organization could move onto the cloud and save upon from the complexities that are involved in running them in their IT infrastructure.

Email

Email is the communication backbone for any organization today, and that is what makes many organizations to setup their own mail servers within their firewalls. Think about the cost involved in the hardware, mail server setup and licensing, not to forget the manpower required to keep this going. Once that is done you have to consider the security of the mail servers from exploits and spam messages. All these hassles are taken care of by the hosted service provider if you opt for email hosting service.

Even if you have an existing email setup, you can migrate to the cloud of service provider of your choice. Today most hosted email service provider offer email migration as part of the package. Additional services like email archiving can also be subscribed for.

Microsoft Exchange, which is the most predominant mail Exchange server used by organizations is also being offered on cloud as Exchange Online. Google Apps is not just mail solution but a suite of business tools like calendar, collaboration apps and online storage.

So, opting for a service like Google Apps, which costs about USD50 per user per year, and comparing that to having the whole email setup on-premise is significant when you also consider the savings from manpower reduction and the quality of service being maintained and offered.