Forrester has an absolutely glowing blog post about VMware’s new cloud offering.

VMWare drives another nail into the coffin of on-premises business email. At $5/mailbox/month for cloud email, f you take away client software and mailbox administration costs, our analysis shows that it costs twice as much to host a mailbox yourself than to host it in the cloud. This offering gives service providers around the world the opportunity to compete at that price. So who would use on-premises email? Only someone with stringent requirements, massive scale, or a recent upgrade. Even the federal government is moving to cloud-based email as GSA has announced.

Who would use on-premises? I am surprised no mention is made of compliance or security. Perhaps that is what is meant by “stringent requirements”? Privacy is one of the main reasons to keep email in-house. The cloud providers, even with a VMware solution such as this, need to clarify procedure and technology options to show they can give privacy equivalent to in-house email. I do not see encryption and subpoena response, for example, as stringent but rather baseline requirements.