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Education IT, Government Cloud

NUS alumni email diverted to the cloud

By Xinghui Guo | 17 January 2011

At the National University of Singapore, email services are taken to the cloud—but only for the 200,000 alumni. And this move alone saves the university US$10,000 a year, cutting costs on manpower, network and server.

In an interview with FutureGov Asia Pacific, Tommy Hor, Director of NUS Computer Centre, said: “The cloud email is for alumni only. Our email services for faculty members and students are managed internally.”

Despite the cost savings, Hor said that the university had no plans to move the internal email to the cloud. “We don’t approach the cloud from a cost point of view, we approach it more to look for organisation agility,” he said.

Hor, who is in charge of spearheading the university’s IT systems supporting teaching, learning, research and administration, said that emails captured too much intellectual property to be placed on the cloud.

“People see email on a superficial level, but we see it very differently. Contents that transpire in students’ and faculty’s emails refer to many things like knowledge and research—properties of the university,” Hor explained.

“We are just sensitive about hosting this content somewhere else, although casual emails are not a problem.”

Hor went on to say that the school’s communication with students can contain a considerable amount of sensitive information. Confidential matters like a student’s results and legal agreements with the school are communicated through email.

What makes the alumni a good candidate for cloud is simple—that they have graduated. “Sometimes I wonder how other institutions see this email issue,” he said.

NUS has explored cloud services but even for services as simple as email, the service level is not up to the standard of the university, Hor added.

“If I want to recover a mailbox, can it be easily done? If there is a legal case, is the vendor obliged to give me the documents? It all depends on the service level.”

But while it all boils down to the Service Level Agreement (SLA), the SLA itself is also a cost component.

Hor explained: “When you talk about cost savings in cloud, you have to take the SLA into account. If you want a higher level of service, it might require you to spend more.”

“The maturity of cloud services just isn’t there yet.”

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