Osterman Research conducted a market research survey with organizations that had at least 50 email users and that had not definitely ruled out the possible use of Office 365. In fact, 5% of the email users in the organizations surveyed are currently served by Office 365, a figure that is expected to increase to 22% by May 2014.

1. sponsored by
Osterman Research, Inc.
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An Osterman Research Survey Report
Published July 2013
sponsored by
Results of a Survey on
Microsoft®
Office 365®
SPON
SURVEYREPORT
SPON

2. ©2013 Osterman Research, Inc. 1
Results of a Survey on Microsoft
Office 365
OVERVIEW
Osterman Research conducted a market research survey with organizations that had
at least 50 email users and that had not definitely ruled out the possible use of Office
365. In fact, 5% of the email users in the organizations surveyed are currently
served by Office 365, a figure that is expected to increase to 22% by May 2014.
The survey, conducted in early May 2013 with the Osterman Research survey panel,
focused on capabilities, features and functions that these organizations would require
from their communication and collaboration systems, and how well these might be
satisfied by Office 365 and other solutions. Some of the results from that survey are
discussed in this white paper, but a separate document will be made available
specifically focused on all of the survey results.
Details of the survey:
• A total of 133 surveys were completed with North American respondents from
the Osterman Research survey panel.
• The mean number of employees at the organizations surveyed was 14,610
(median was 1,700) and the mean number of email users was 13,445 (median
was 1,300).
• Respondents to the survey had to be decision makers or influencers with regard
to their organization’s email system.
• Organizations that definitely will not migrate to Office 365 were excluded from
the survey. Obviously, this increased the proportion of survey respondents that
were planning to migrate to Office 365, but our goal in this research was to
determine attitudes and practices among organizations that at least had the
potential to migrate to the platform at some point.
The white paper that discusses the results of this research is available on the
Osterman Research Web site here.
SURVEY FINDINGS
What is Your Organization’s Plan for Migrating to Office 365?
Osterman
Research
conducted a
market research
survey with
organizations
that had at least
50 email users
and that had not
definitely ruled
out the possible
use of Office 365.

3. ©2013 Osterman Research, Inc. 2
Results of a Survey on Microsoft
Office 365
Percentage of Email Users by Platform
Mid-2013 and Mid-2014
If Your Organization Decided to Migrate to Office 365, Which of the
Following Do You Think You Would Adopt?
Roughly one-half
of the organ-
izations surveyed
would synch-
ronize content
between Office
365 and on-
premise
solutions.

4. ©2013 Osterman Research, Inc. 3
Results of a Survey on Microsoft
Office 365
How Many Email-Generating Applications are There in Your Organization?
How Interested is Your Organization in Each of the Following Email
Archiving Capabilities
% Responding Interested or Very Interested
More than one-
half of organ-
izations surveyed
have more than
50 email-
generating
applications.

5. ©2013 Osterman Research, Inc. 4
Results of a Survey on Microsoft
Office 365
Importance of Various Reasons to Consider Moving Email to the Cloud
% Responding Important or Extremely Important
Reason %
To reduce email costs 66%
To reduce the workload for IT staff 61%
To free up IT staff for other projects/initiatives 55%
To add new features and functions 48%
To improve email reliability 47%
To ease the migration to a new email system 39%
Email was moved (or would be moved) to the cloud as part of
a desire for a broader productivity solution in the cloud and
alone was not (or would be) the driving factor
35%
How Important to Your Organization are the Following Capabilities in an
Email Archiving Solution
% Responding Important or Very Important
Concern About Various Issues Related to Cloud Email
% Responding Concerned or Extremely Concerned
Reason %
The security of your documents that are (or would be) stored
in a cloud provider’s data center
80%
The security of your email content that is (or would be) stored
in a cloud provider’s data center
76%
URLs in emails that lead to malware 65%
Changes in URL intent between the time a message is
scanned and the time the URL is clicked
58%
Most
organizations
want the ability
to tag content
and support for
multiple
reviewers’ roles
in an archiving
solution.

6. ©2013 Osterman Research, Inc. 5
Results of a Survey on Microsoft
Office 365
Regardless of Whether or Not Your Organization is Using Office 365, Which
of the Following Best Describes Your View of the 25-Gigabyte User Mailbox
Provided With the Offering?
Importance of Various Capabilities
% Responding Important or Extremely Important
Reason %
Single Sign-On capabilities for all cloud services 71%
Integrating content between Office 365 and on-premise
systems
67%
The ability to perform eDiscovery searches on content stored
in email
67%
The ability to retain an immutable copy of all information for a
set period of time
65%
A cloud email provider offering SLAs for spam and malware
filtering
65%
The ability of a cloud email provider to offer multi-vendor
threat protection
62%
Having multiple malware scanners for filtering incoming email 62%
The ability to encrypt information while it is at rest in an email
archive
61%
The ability to completely shift the eDiscovery process to your
legal team instead of having IT still involved
60%
The ability to create, edit and manage documents online 59%
Integrated, end-to-end email encryption 58%
The ability to perform eDiscovery on content stored in
SharePoint
53%
Integrated DLP for scanning the email channel 50%
Third-party backup and archiving capabilities for Office 365 50%
Graymail filtering capabilities (by “graymail”, we mean content
like newsletters or mailing list content users might have
signed up for, but that can be mistaken for spam)
42%
Content classification and reorganization capabilities 40%
Third-party backup and archiving capabilities for SharePoint 40%
Most believe the
25Gb mailbox in
Office 365 would
not pose any
problems.

7. ©2013 Osterman Research, Inc. 6
Results of a Survey on Microsoft
Office 365
Which of the Following Best Describes Your Organization’s View of Having
Microsoft Manage Your Email Infrastructure (e.g., via Office 365), Whether
or Not Microsoft is Currently Doing This For You?
Looking Out Over the Next Few Years, Which of the Following Do You
Anticipate Your Organization Will Ultimately Employ for Managing Email?
One-half of
organizations
surveyed are
neutral about the
prospect of
Microsoft
managing their
email infra-
structure.

8. ©2013 Osterman Research, Inc. 7
Results of a Survey on Microsoft
Office 365
Knowing That Email is Still a Popular Attack Vector For Advanced
Persistent Threats (APTs), How Confident Are You That The Email Security
Offering Bundled By Your Current or Future Hosted Mailbox Provider Will
Keep Pace With New Threats?
If Your Organization Migrated Some or All of Your Users to Office 365, With
Which of the Following Other Cloud Repositories Would You Integrate
Office 365?
Top Five Responses
One in eight
organizations are
not confident
about hosted
security
providers’ ability
to defend against
APTs.

9. ©2013 Osterman Research, Inc. 8
Results of a Survey on Microsoft
Office 365
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