Amazon Workmail from $4 per Month

If you use email (who doesn’t?), it is most likely that you will use Microsoft’s Outlook program or Google’s Gmail program in your place of work. Things maybe about to change as Amazon’s latest venture shows. The online retail giant announced on January 28th a new service called WorkMail. The service is specifically tailored around email and calendar functions for businesses. This new service from Amazon will launch in the second quarter of 2015 and the starting price will be $4 per user per month for a 50GB sized mailbox.

This new service has been hailed as a secure cloud-based email and calendar management program. It definitely looks like WorkMail is about to take on Outlook and Gmail in the war for business enterprise email. Thanks to information obtained by Forbes, this new service will offer numerous features, including shared calendars and mailboxes, a global address book and resource booking tools for organising meeting rooms and shared spaces.

WorkMail is an extension of AWS, the Web Services suite from Amazon. This product includes WorkSpaces and Zocalo. Workspaces is a virtual desktop, which can be accessed via tablets and laptops, while Zocalo is a Dropbox-esq cloud storage service.

A big issue will be security and how Amazon will manage this requirement in the new service. It was understood that WorkMail would use Amazon’s Key Management Service and this looks like it is going to happen. By incorporating Amazon’s Key Management Service, data from WorkMail can be encrypted with keys that are supplied either by the user or by Amazon themselves. For more varied access over their data, firms can also choose where their information is stored.

Only time will tell whether or not Amazon’s WorkMail will turn out to be a true contender to Microsoft’s Outlook. One thing is for sure, if you run a business, then you are going to have a plethora of services to choose from.

[Image via aws.amazon]

SOURCE: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/amazon-workmail-launch,news-20372.html