Amazon announces enterprise email service

SEATTLE: Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced managed business email and calendaring service called Amazon WorkMail- a move which pits it against Microsoft and Google.

Hosting email on-premises requires expensive hardware, complex software licensing, and ongoing maintenance work. Existing cloud email services may help with some of these problems, but they either don’t offer the security features businesses require.

Now, Amazon WorkMail delivers the simplicity and on-demand access of a managed cloud service that works with popular email clients and also has the security controls enterprises need.

Amazon WorkMail enables users to send and receive email, manage contacts, share calendars, and book resources using the same email applications they use today (Microsoft Outlook, their Web browser, or their native iOS and Android email applications) without buying and managing hardware or licensing expensive and complex email server software.

It eliminates the need to purchase and license email servers and handle the ongoing patching, back-up, and upgrades involved in maintaining these systems. customers can quickly integrate Amazon WorkMail with their existing corporate directory, choose encryption keys, select the location where they want their data to reside, and pay only for the mailboxes they create.

Peter De Santis, VP, AWS Compute Services said, “We built Amazon WorkMail to address these requests and to help businesses achieve agility and cost savings by letting AWS manage the non-differentiated heavy lifting involved in corporate email and calendaring.”

Amazon has launched a preview of Amazon WorkMail. After the 30-day free trial (25 users and 50 gigabytes of storage per user), pricing will be on a per-user, pay-as-you-go basis. Users will be charged $4 per month for a 50 gigabyte WorkMail mailbox, or $6 per month for a bundle that includes WorkMail and WorkDocs.