In “Moving Exchange to the Cloud, Part 1,” I discussed the changing competitive landscape for Microsoft Exchange Server and the engineering effort in Exchange Server 2010 to create a version of the software that is suitable for cloud-based deployments as part of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS). In this article I discuss some of the challenges companies face as they determine whether cloud-based services are suitable for their purposes.
Companies that are considering moving their Exchange-based email services to the cloud have many things to consider. Some companies are ahead of the game, because they’re already using the Internet to replace expensive dedicated connections between their company network and a hosting provider. By exploring their own variation of the cloud, they can better understand the challenges they will face if they truly move to cloud-based services. Other companies might never transition from inhouse servers because of their overall conservative approach to IT, fears about data integrity, regulatory or legal compliance requirements within certain industries (e.g., the FDA requirement to validate the systems that pharmaceutical companies use for drug trials), the unavailability of high-quality or sufficient bandwidth in certain geographic locations, or because they operate in countries that require data to stay within national boundaries. Some companies might be chomping at the bit to move to Microsoft Online Services because they’re running older versions of Exchange Server and they see cloud computing as an effective way to upgrade their infrastructure.
Regardless of how eager (or reluctant) your company might seem to embrace cloud computing, you need to ask several questions to evaluate whether your organization is truly ready to operate email in the cloud. You need to consider hosted email options, user needs, support responsibilities, application integration, and cost. In addition, you should be aware that hosted email services simply might not be the best solution for your organization.
Hosted Email
BPOS includes two flavors of hosted Exchange: dedicated and standard. The dedicated offering is available only to customers that have at least 5,000 mailboxes—probably because creating a dedicated environment with network, hardware, Help desk, security, and directory synchronization components on any smaller scale than this just isn’t worthwhile. The standard offering uses a multi-tenant infrastructure to support mailboxes. All the mailboxes are hosted on the same set of servers and use the same directory (i.e., Global Address List), with logical divisions that make the mailboxes and directory appear to be separate.
Microsoft promises 99.9 percent scheduled uptime for data centers that currently run Exchange Server 2007 with a planned upgrade to Exchange Server 2010. Note that Microsoft already offers Exchange 2010 as a hosted service to customers in the educational sector as part of Exchange Labs; this approach has let the Microsoft development group test and prove the code during Exchange 2010 development to ensure that it’s suitable for large-scale hosted deployments.
Standard hosted Exchange offers several add-ons for an additional cost; these options include a mailbox capacity upgrade from the base 1GB, BlackBerry support, archiving, and migration from another email system. The standard offering supports Windows Mobile 6.0 and later devices, Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003, Outlook Web Access (OWA), and Entourage; it will also support Outlook 2010.
The dedicated offering is more flexible and customizable, because it’s committed to just one customer. This service includes options such as business continuity and disaster recovery.
List prices vary from country to country. Microsoft announced in November 2009 that it would offer BPOS for $10 per user per month (including Exchange, SharePoint, and Office Communications Server—OCS). The price reduction was intended to allow Microsoft to compete head-to-head with Google Apps Premier Edition, which starts at $50 per user per year plus add-ons. However, the new price came as a shock to many hosting partners because it makes a substantial cut in the margins available in the hosting business. The price war between Microsoft and Google will continue and might further lower mailbox costs.
Because Microsoft designed Exchange 2007 for traditional deployments, it isn’t surprising that some of the more advanced features, such as transport rules, rights management, and unified messaging (UM), don’t work in hosted environments. Microsoft expects to be able to support these features in Exchange 2010 because this version was engineered to support multi-tenanted hosted deployments. Exchange 2010 also has an improved distributed management model that leverages PowerShell 2.0’s remote capabilities to let administrators control their data running on servers in Microsoft data centers.