Contributed Article.  Author: Joel Blaiberg, product manager for unified communications at Quest Software, now a part of Dell

 

 

So, you’re migrating your email users to the cloud? Great! And you want to discuss reporting? No problem! Now, what kind of reporting are you interested in?

 

Believe it or not, as a product manager for an email reporting solution, I have similar conversations with customers and prospects. The problem is that once you have migrated your hardware and storage platforms from on-premise to the cloud, some of what previously kept you up at night has effectively been outsourced. For example, you need not worry about server performance or the size of mail databases ─ they’re no longer your (direct) problem. Of course, depending on your service provider, you may be charged by the number of user subscriptions and/or the amount of mail data you are storing. Similarly there are other data points you may be concerned about. Here are just a few examples:

 

·         SLAs – You are now relying on another service provider for your users to send and receive mail. As well as monitoring connectivity, you should have a mechanism for determining whether your service provider is adhering to any Service Level Agreements specified in your contract regarding downtime, maintenance windows, etc.
 

·         Mail Content – While your service provider or a third party may provide archiving and/or e-discovery tools (see my colleague Keri Farrell’s excellent blog post) you may want to produce audit reports to ensure that appropriate use of mail and retention or content policies are being adhered to.
 

·         User maintenance – User inventory including contact details, password expiration dates, administrative users, etc. are useful for the day-to-day administration of user accounts in the cloud.
 

·         Usage – Top mailbox sizes and quotas (if used), top senders/receivers, inactive users, etc. will allow you to determine whether your level of subscription is over- or under-provisioned, and whether there are any accounts that can be deactivated or repurposed.
 

·         Hybrid – Migration reports that can show the status of a migrated user from on-premise to the cloud (or back again). Additionally, enterprise customers who plan to be in a hybrid deployment for the foreseeable future would benefit from having a single reporting portal to cover both their on-premise and cloud accounts, versus having separate reporting solutions.
 

·         Data Mining – You can now provision your users with multi-gigabyte primary and archiving mailboxes, but how do organizations unlock the business value that is trapped in these large stores? For example, would it be useful to know who’s talking to whom, and about what, to identify and surface important business connections and ideas? Who are your subject matter experts?  Are conversations occurring in emails that are much better suited for other collaboration platforms you have invested in? Is corporate content or IP being shared inappropriately outside the organization? These are all questions into which you can glean insight by mining the data that your users are filing away in their mailboxes.
 

We cover most of the above examples in Quest MessageStats and our new Business Insights component. However, as explained in the introduction to this post, I am still digging deeper, with our customers and prospects, into their reporting requirements when moving from solely on-premise platforms to a cloud or hybrid deployment. Do you have some other reporting requirements you would like to discuss? If so, I would love to hear from you.

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