You’d have to have spent the last two years of your professional career living under a rock to have not come across “the cloud”. The cloud – this; the cloud – that; the cloud, the cloud, the cloud… Cloud computing promises to be the next sea change in information technology, as more and more Somethings as a Service (*aaS) hit the market, with every player from Microsoft and Google all the way down to JoeBob’s Hosting trying to get in on the action.

Email services look to be the most common, some of the easiest to move to the cloud, and certainly of the most interest to readers of this blog. My colleagues Jeff Orloff and Paul Mah have both written some great articles around this topic already. Today, I want to talk about cloud based email services from a different point of view; that of the email admin who thinks the cloud will make his or her job go away.

There are all sorts of euphemisms for jobs coming to an end; downsizing, right sizing, smart sizing, outsourcing, off shoring, and many others. I’ve been involved in a few of these. Sometimes I was the last man standing, other times I was the rat leaving the sinking ship, and once I was the deer in the headlights who never believed it would happen to him. All of those situations sucked, and I don’t want to promise you that no one will lose their job because their company moved their email to the cloud. What I do want to do is help you realize that:

a)      Moving your company’s email to the cloud DOES NOT mean your company doesn’t need email admins. Your boss is a fool if they think they can get rid of the entire email team.

b)      If you are an in house Exchange shop today, you will want to keep some in house Exchange servers even after the cloud move is complete. It’s called hybrid mode, and it offers significant advantages to a company, and it means you still need email admins.

c)       Overworked shops might find the cloud to be just the relief they need.

d)      There are several new skillsets a company needs to have in-house to support a cloud based service. There are opportunities to take your skillset to the next level and be just as critical tomorrow as you are today.

e)      Cloud migrations can take months; sometimes more than a year. Sure, an SMB can move their email in a weekend to the cloud, but an enterprise with thousands of users and gigabytes of email will take much longer, starting with remediation.

Your company will still need email admins

Managing a cloud based service requires admins who can take care of user needs, client needs, provisioning, set up, backups and restores, and to be the contact between the users and the service provider. Cloud providers take care of the care and feeding for an email system, and are on the hook for BCP/DR, but they don’t talk to end users and they don’t provision accounts.

Hybrid mode

Keeping some Exchange servers on premise lets you move mailboxes from the cloud back to your own servers, which lets you keep access to the mailboxes of former employees without paying the monthly costs to keep that mailbox in the cloud. Some companies are deciding to move only the regular users to the cloud, while keeping key personnel and executives’ mailboxes on-prem…in essence outsourcing the basic users to free up space and resources while keeping the VIPs in house to provide more personal service. You may also find add-ons like archiving are better kept in-house, which means you need email servers (just not as many as before).

Taking some of the load off

Again, that hybrid model offers a lot to consider. Moving the regular users’ mailboxes to the cloud not only reduces the number of servers you need, it frees up the diskspace your power users need for their multi-gigabyte mailboxes. Cloud providers are great, but they are not, and never will be, able to offer the executives the personal hand holding they expect when they have problems, need their Crackberries reset, or can’t find that critical email. You may find yourself going home earlier, and not getting as many late night calls.

Skillsets

To keep a company’s email running smoothly during and after a migration to the cloud, you will need to understand licensing, cost models, federated services, vendor management, and can also polish up your customer support skills. In every large org I have ever dealt with, the vendor management folks are some of the highest paid in all of IT. Dealing with a cloud provider is not a bad way to break into that tax bracket. Plus, most email admins know some networking and AD stuff; both of which are important and might let you move to another team. Working on a cloud migration can make you very marketable to those who offer cloud based email services. Consider also the security aspects of using a cloud provider – security has been one of the top ten most sought after skills in IT since the late 90′s and cloud security is a hot topic you can get hands-on experience with as you go through a new migration.

Time

Even if none of the above appeal and you are convinced that your job is on the chopping block, there is no need to jump ship day one. Cloud migrations will take significantly longer than anyone expects until they get into the project planning. For the duration of that project, you are one of the most important persons in the room. Have an honest conversation with your management, knowing that you are in a position of power. They need you to make the migration successful, and you have every right to know whether you are targeted for a new role or not post migration. I have seen email admins get very generous severance packages in return for staying with a project.

Don’t automatically assume that the words “the cloud” are another euphemism for “time to job hunt”. Look at it from all angles, never underestimate your own importance to the project, and make the most of it. You can find that every cloud really does have a silver lining if you keep your wits about you.