Cloud computing fosters enterprise efficiency

For the Royal Mail, the organization that delivers post to every household in the United Kingdom, efficiency has to be part of everyday operations. The company has approximately 165,000 employees that have to be managed, and the cloud is key in accomplishing the task.

According to a recent Computing report, the large staff of the Royal Mail delivers approximately 70 million items to 28 million addresses on a weekly basis. To handle the sheer volume of work inherent in the scope of its operations, the Royal Mail needed to find an efficient and flexible technological model. It turned to cloud computing, the report said, and has not looked back.

The cloud is key because the agency has to balance customer relationship information from 24 million customers spread over 12,000 post offices and 3,000 processing sites, the report said. To consolidate, manage and analyze this information, an the 404 million pieces of domestic European parcels the Royal Mail processes each year, the company began to use the cloud in 2008, the report said.

Adrian Steel, head of infrastructure management for the Royal Mail, told the news source that the organization considered the cloud for a variety of reasons. It eventually selected the technology because they saw its elasticity, ability to eliminate capital expenses and scalability, he said.

The cloud migration began in 2008, when 28,000 employees were moved off of their legacy email software to a cloud platform, Steel said. At the time, employees were running an older email application that was creating inefficiencies because it was outdated, but so "highly entrenched," Steel said, that it could not easily be replaced by traditional means. Deploying the cloud solved those issues, and let the organization replace the aging email client.

During the pilot period, results came fast. Steel told the news source 46 percent of the 28,000-person program were able to move to the new cloud email platform overnight.

"The transition was very successful, with huge customer satisfaction even though you were changing a core primary business tool. Now that we've been up and running for a good nine months, we're starting to see the full benefits of the transformation," Steel told Computing.

Steel also said the cloud solution was better because it offered users significantly more space to work with. In the past, managing storage limitations was time consuming and problematic. With the cloud, it was no longer an issue, he told the news source.

When this pilot period was finished, Steel began a nine-month process of evaluating all of the organization's internal productivity software. During that time, he identified how much it would cost to make the minor upgrades necessary to keep the system up-to-date, how expensive it would be to make any upgrades later and what impact it would have if the company transitioned to a SaaS platform instead of using licensed software.

Steel told the news source that the cost benefits of the cloud were too good to ignore, and the Royal Mail was able to easily decide to switch to the advanced technology. However, cost was not the only important issue. The cloud productivity solution also fostered an environment for collaboration, Steel told Computing.

The Royal Mail's experience in the cloud is indicative of the many benefits of a robust public cloud solution. However, some businesses are turning to private clouds to foster efficiency. According to a recent SYS-CON Media report, companies adopting private cloud solutions can achieve comparable efficiency to the public cloud, but need to be cautious about how they manage spending on internal IT infrastructure.