Amazon has announced a new corporate email and calendar service dubbed WorkMail that will take on Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Gmail.
Powered by Amazon’s cloud-based computing unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the new service, called WorkMail, will enable users to send and receive email, manage contacts, share calendars, and book resources using the same email applications they use, including Microsoft Outlook, their Web browser, or their native iOS and Android email applications, without buying and managing hardware or licensing expensive and complex email server software, Amazon noted in an official statement released Wednesday.
Users will be able to integrate Amazon WorkMail with their existing corporate directory and control both the keys that encrypt their data and the location in which their data is stored. They will also have the option to synchronize their mailboxes with iOS, Android, Amazon Fire, and Windows Phone devices.
Amazon WorkMail will not require any complex software to install or maintain and no hardware to manage. It will automatically handle all of the patches, back-ups, and upgrades.
Furthermore, Amazon claims that WorkMail will scan all incoming and outgoing email for spam, malware and viruses to help protect users from any kind of malicious email.
The online retailer is offering a free 30-day trial of Amazon WorkMail for up to 25 users. However, after the trial period gets over, the email service will cost $4 per month per inbox with 50GB of storage or $6 if bundled with Amazon WorkDocs.
“Customers have repeatedly asked us for a business email and calendaring service that is more cost-effective and simpler to manage than their on-premises solution, more secure than the cloud-based offerings available today, and that is backed by the same best-in-class infrastructure platform on which they’re reliably running so many of their current (and future) workloads,” said Peter De Santis, Vice President, AWS Compute Services.
“We built Amazon WorkMail to address these requests and to help businesses achieve agility and cost savings by letting AWS manage the non-differentiated heavy lifting involved in corporate email and calendaring.”
