Welcome to the 1st of a 4 part series of blog posts focusing on
Microsoft's premier messaging suite, Microsoft Exchange 2010.
In this post, I'll look at the changing landscape aligned to
platform delivery methods and will focus on the questions your
business needs to be asking to determine which delivery model
(on-premise or Cloud) would best suit your environment, now and for
the future.
We all use email on a daily basis and, with the ever increasing
demand on this business critical application, ensuring the
application is "always on" is a key deliverable for any
Head of IT and IT service department. For sure, as soon as
email is offline, everyone from the work experience student to the
CEO are wanting to know why mail isn't working and when it
will be back online.
Historically, the fundamentals of the Exchange environment has
meant onsite or on network deployments have been common place.
However, with much improved Internet speeds, the rise of flexible
computing as a result of virtualisation, and more cost
effective datacentre space enabling multisite replication,
companies are now faced with a real choice whether to host Exchange
on network or deliver it as a service.
Points for consideration
- How many sites do you have?
- What effect would an outage have on your business and how
long could you survive without it?
- Do you archive mail? If so, for how long & how much storage
would you need over the next 5 years?
- Will you need to follow Microsoft best practice and deploy a
clustered environment?
- How is your network (WAN) currently configured?
- Would you like an SLA to be aligned to the uptime of the
application?
- What growth do you expect in mail usage or how much growth have
you seen over the last 3 years?
- Who requires remote access to mail?
- What internal staffing resources do you have to manage a new
system?
- How do you deliver training?
A final thought
Email is here to stay for some time to come. The data held
within the application is going to increase and the application
will hold greater importance to your business as the information
held within it becomes more business critical.
The choice to deploy Exchange 2010 on-premise or in the Cloud is
open to much debate. It's likely to boil down to whether your
organisation really sees the benefits which the new Cloud delivery
model offers. However, one thing's for sure - you now have a real
choice and one which needs careful consideration before committing
either way.
If you think you need any more advice, find out more about our
Exchange 2010 consultancy and hosting service options here.