Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud services division of mammoth parent company Amazon.com Inc., today announced general availability of its Amazon WorkMail email and calendaring solution in the US West, US East, and Europe regions.
Available in preview form since January 2015 and designed to be a quick and easy cloud-based substitute for on-premises email servers, WorkMail integrates with existing Microsoft Active Directory implementations via the AWS Directory Service and runs on third-party desktop and mobile email clients that businesses already utilize. Those include the Windows and Apple OS X versions of Microsoft Outlook, the desktop edition of Apple Mail, and any mobile app for the iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Fire Phone, Android, Windows Phone, or BlackBerry 10 that supports the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol. There’s also a Web interface usable on the Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer browsers.
Amazon has long positioned security as one of WorkMail’s key strengths. The solution integrates with the AWS Key Management Service to encrypt email at rest in Amazon’s data centers; boasts ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018 certifications; and lets users control which region their data resides in. That last point is an increasingly important one for companies concerned about shifting, geographically-specific data privacy laws and snooping government intelligence services.
AWS charges $4 per user per month for WorkMail subscriptions, which come with 50 GB per mailbox of storage space. Alternatively, users can pay $6 per user per month for a combination subscription to both WorkMail and WorkDocs (formerly Zocalo), Amazon’s file share and sync solution.
Those two services interoperate with one another, and when used together equip businesses with many of the capabilities available in solutions such as Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps. The latter two products sell for as little as $5 per user per month, however, and are backed by more extensive partner ecosystems.
Amazon clearly sees an attractive market for WorkMail just the same among companies in need of an affordable, low-stress way to replace on-site Microsoft Exchange Server deployments with a hosted email solution. As AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr noted in a blog post earlier today, Amazon now offers a free Exchange-to-WorkMail migration tool aimed at streamlining that process.
Coming to WorkMail in the future, Barr added, are a unified email address book and email journaling functionality that will allow users to preserve WorkMail messages in external archiving solutions. AWS has yet to reveal when those features will reach market.
