One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with your business. The digital messaging space pertaining to email infrastructure has lived in a hybrid cloud since 2014. A cloud-based delivery infrastructure environment combined with an industrial grade on-premise message transfer agent (MTA) platform such as PowerMTA or Momentum has been proven to deliver much higher degrees of agility to your organization.

With the cloud, senders no longer need to plan for and procure MTAs and other IT infrastructure weeks or months in advance. Instead, they can instantly access hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes and deploy massive amounts of emails faster than ever. A hybrid cloud offering combines cloud services and on-premise infrastructure into an aggregated pool of resources. This allows workloads to be distributed between on-premise software and private cloud environments and gives your business greater flexibility, efficiency and agility, including additional sending deployment options. A key benefit of hybrid infrastructure is that it enables a variety of hybrid workload implementations. This hybrid-cloud is particularly valuable for dynamic or highly changeable workloads, which is often the case when scaling email.

For example, during peak seasons when email sending demands spike, especially during the holidays, a simple use case would be to divert some of your sending traffic such as your transactional email streams to a cloud solution. This puts less pressure on your on-premise SMTP solution, providing a secure deployment option for mission critical messaging. A hybrid cloud solution provides flexibility and scalability, immediately meeting the demands of your workload on an as-needed basis. This strategy eliminates the need for your company to make continued, substantial capital expenditures or investments, such as purchasing additional licenses or configuring additional instances of on-premise MTAs to meet excess demand. A hybrid cloud can accommodate short-term spikes in workloads and provide resources on demand that can be deployed instantaneously.

Faster IP Warm Up

Cloud platforms tethered to the digital messaging space have the ability to scale to unpredictable demand levels in the shortest time frames. With cloud-based email infrastructure, ISP delivery policies are already optimized, providing efficiencies that are unmatched and bypassing the configuration of VirtualMTAs or individual tiers of messaging streams. Port25 leverages one of those efficiencies with IP Warm Up, which gives you the ability to quickly add reputable new IP addresses to their sending infrastructure. In the past, unlocking a dedicated IP and ramping up to achieve highly scalable sending volumes would take weeks and sometimes months. Under most circumstances, depending on your cloud provider, when you use IP Warm Up, IPs with excellent sending reputations are already warm and optimized for highly scalable workloads immediately. Cloud-based email infrastructure creates recognized efficiencies because sending patterns are customized to ensure that the most reputable IPs are readily available for your clients.

Hybrid Cloud Transactional Mail Solution – Cloud platforms tethered to the digital messaging space have the ability to scale to unpredictable demand levels in the shortest time frames.(Click to Enlarge)

Further, onboarding your clients to a cloud platform ensures speed and processing power in a shorter time interval. Onboarding customers no longer have the pain point of establishing their dedicated IP instance, now that the 30- to 45-day wait period for messaging to scale is removed. With cloud infrastructure in place, onboarding brand new customers is instant.

Combining the on-premise MTA with a cloud option frees the company from being tied down by processing power, security and granular configuration requirements. VirtualMTAs and/or binders are instantly deployed based on sending patterns associated with your segmented email streams. This creates enhanced dexterity in your business environment that minimizes risk, and brings higher customer satisfaction, leading to greater market-share and revenue.

One company that deploys a hybrid solution is MessageGears, a Port25 Solutions, Inc., client, that uses PowerMTA as its on-premise infrastructure solution to power emails on behalf of its clients. By combining the power and security of installed software with the efficiency and scalability of cloud delivery, MessageGears enables marketers to capitalize on every email they send. The combination of an on-premise solution with a data-driven cloud delivery model ensures that workloads are secure and well balanced. Hybrid cloud computing enables enterprises to augment their isolated, on-premise MTA without large costs or scaling requirements. The cloud solution enables high-availability, resiliency, and the ability to introduce new functionality quickly.

Security

Data security for digital messaging cloud sending environments is a chief concern for many businesses. Security threats today are increasingly more diverse and more sophisticated, chasing multiple different attack vectors. This can cripple an organization’s ability to detect and adapt proactively to avoid service interruptions. While hackers of yesterday were motivated by profit, today’s criminals want PII—and they are pursuing security sinkholes far more swiftly and aggressively than their hacker predecessors.

With the explosion of sensitive company data stored in the cloud, businesses need stronger, more secure access to web-based applications. Recently, SparkPost introduced multi-factor authentication (MFA) for even greater security with all of your web application integrations. Multi-factor authentication is the gold standard for ensuring that a user is legitimate at login. It is the cornerstone of enterprise integration.

Not all enterprises can make the case for a hybrid cloud solution. Your organization’s cloud adoption journey will be unique. An understanding of your current situation and your overall goals will shape your transition toward the cloud.

Everyday, however, the case for a hybrid cloud becomes more compelling. Skills and competencies once revered in the email space can now be offloaded to the cloud, for continuous integration and heightened optimization. The hybrid cloud environment can redefine the workplace, while additional security layers take precedence. Our customers have found that the business benefits far outweigh the costs when they switch from a lone on-premise solution .

To be a leading provider in 2015 requires a large footprint in the cloud. If you are focused on reducing cost, stimulating innovation and growth for your clients, expanding into new geographies, and diversifying your business, the hybrid cloud offering is your ticket to improving quality, reducing complexity, and empowering your customers.

Written by Fred Tabsharani, Vice President of Marketing, Port25 Solutions, Inc. He can be reached by email via [email protected] for any questions. Follow him on twitter @tabsharani.