UK postal service soars through the cloud

Email and messaging services for the Royal Mail Group, the U.K.'s largest mail service, have recently undergone a major overhaul, reports Computing. Now, postal employees across the country must log onto the cloud to access their electronic messages.

The biggest factor influencing the RMG's migration to the cloud, according to head of infrastructure and management Adrian Steel, was the cost of running the system.

Steel told the news source that the company's old system, IBM Lotus Notes, was becoming a burden on the government-run service, as the "the cost of running this highly entrenched Notes infrastructure was spiralling, while operational efficiency was being compromised because employees were struggling with the out-of-date software.

The cloud initiative, which began over a year and a half ago, has since reduced the RMG's operational costs. Furthermore, Steel claims that the migration to the cloud was also carried out to give the organization's staff more effective tools and computing systems to boost productivity, making their lives easier.

The cloud is quickly becoming the preferred computing architecture for governments around the world. According to SYS-CON, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently switched over to cloud-enabled email, becoming the first "cabinet-level" agency in the United States to do so.