This is the final part of my previous postings and I would like to conclude this series by mentioning some nitty-gritty facts before choosing your preferred hosting company. If you have missed reading my previous posts on this series, do visit them at the below URLs:

1. Are You A Growing Small Business? Exchange Hosting will bring peace of mind! (Part I)
2. Exchange Hosting: Factors which can bring peace of mind to your growing small business (Part II)

Introduction

After all the initial studies, now you are considering the hosting company to outsource your e-mail infrastructure. Wait! Aska  few more questions… Dave Grantz recently published a nice article where he advises customers to ask some essential questions. Why would some of the hosting companies rush with an attractive deal while compromising reliability and customer support? Customers should realize that not all the hosting companies offer redundant infrastructure, stable backups and efficient support. While offering down to earth lower price per mailbox, they might be eyeing on various extra fees for services. Who knows, there might be some hidden clause where customer will be stuck with the hosting providers for a certain period once signed up.

Know the difference: Managed Hosting & Non-managed Hosting

Managed Hosting – In a managed environment, the following tasks should be performed by the hoster:

1. Server maintenance, related facilitation in the datacenter & physical security of the whole infrastructure.
2. Data backups, patch management, support related issues & escalation which occurs from time to time.
3. Related software license management and further procurement of hardware/software, if any.

In a Non-Managed Hosting environment, you can rent a server in its datacenter rack space. The way servers are being managed and maintained is not the hoster’s headache. If something happens to these servers, you literally have to worry about how to bring this back online not the hosters. In other words, you crush your business continuity by outsourcing the server.

Is Data protection guaranteed?

Here belief comes first. Secondly, how credible your Hosting Company is. If you are not getting a firm answer on this, the hosting company may not have established enough security standards. Go to the next level of checking; do they have a very good protection from spam and virus? Though most of the hosting companies provide anti spam and anti virus protection, some of them are not and some of them offer a very basic one. Many offer the standard one which cannot cope with the daily innovative spammers, however the advanced solution of anti spam and antivirus can offer the customer some desired level of guaranteed protection. (Of course, with additional fees)

Look at their Spam filtering policies no matter standard or advanced. Most of the filtering is done at the server level, there are situations where you need user control to further refinement/validation purpose. The reason for doing this end user level is because of accidental filtering of legitimate mails at the server level. I remember, in my previous company we used to have web access (accessible even from the internet) where we log in to the Inbox in an Anti Spam appliance to retrieve messages those being filtered accidentally.

Data Recovery from the Exchange Mailbox.

This is most demanding in some companies where end users casually deletes and expect the support people to recover whenever they demand. Its productivity killing and sensitive task. Again, depends of company’s retention policy. So this is even worse when you outsource your email to a hosting company if you do not have a proper data recovery policy. I know good hosting companies do provide clear retention policies and backup tape rotation method. On top of it, with an archival system users don’t need to manage their PST for past years and they can access it using the web from anywhere. Statistics from various research firms shows that employees waste their time in managing PST, worst case when the valuable PSTs crash and are irrecoverable (because these ignorant users store beyond 2GB). What if a mailbox of an old employee needs to be recovered for legal purposes? In a nutshell, it is very essential to understand and ensure how fast this can be recovered.

All these come at an additional cost! Usually mailbox retention policies starts from 14-30 days. But retention of backup tapes is not longer, therefore you must have an idea if any long term archival is done and also, how much it costs.

How is the pricing done?

Most of the hosting companies charge per mailbox that is being hosted (e.g. $7 per month). This doesn’t mean that you are going to get all the features you need. So get down to granular details.
For example, Mailbox size - Managing mailbox quota is always challenging for the support team, especially users keep demanding an increase as they reach the quota (some users who do not want to learn the simple techniques of controlling the mailbox).

Eventually if you decide to increase the mailbox size for the users, be prepared for additional costs. Likewise, there are additional charges for more functionality (e.g. Mobility, Archival etc.)

Before I conclude, there are many other areas you can check to analyze the performance a hosting company that you are considering. Check their server availability/downtime status in the previous years. Do a detailed reading of various clauses in its Service Level Agreement, What if you want to migrate to a new Exchange version etc…

Lisa Masiello
123Together.com
781-273-6245 x652
lmasiello@123together.com

Which one makes sense to outsource first out of all the infrastructure components in your organization? I vote for email systems (guess it’s based on MS Exchange too). The first benefit which comes into the picture is reduced cost; let the hosting providers carry the headache of the most difficult responsibilities such as operation, keeping the infrastructure up-to-date with latest technologies, customer support, complying various regulations from government, etc.

Away from complexity

Managing e-mail servers needs expertise; if it’s Microsoft Exchange Server, the magnitude of complexity is drastic and needs real technical expertise to manage it. Microsoft Exchange is the dominate email server in the market; hence most SMBs prefer this platform due to its usability factors. Good news is that many Exchange hosting providers can consolidate and take care of your organization’s entire email infrastructure, hosting, email management, support, etc. So get rid of this unwanted complexity from your business as hosters can take care of single point of failures, reliability and high-availability.

Even in a simple Exchange 2007 deployment, it requires multiple components working together to secure the email system. Figure 1 below might seem complicated, but it represents the basic infrastructure of an email system using Exchange Server 2007.

Figure 1 (click for larger image)

Outsource! Outsource! Outsource…

Let me list down some of the unavoidable upfront cost when you set up email systems in-house:

• Hardware procurement in the beginning
• Licensing for Windows 2003 and Exchange Servers
• Antivirus/Anti Spam software
• Client Access License (CALs) for Microsoft Outlook
• Spare parts to minimize the lengthy downtime when critical hardware failure
• Additional cost as standby for exchange administrators to be on-call 24×7

The reason for me to yell to outsource is simply because of the above mentioned factors. You can literally avoid all these hassles by outsourcing to a hosting company; enjoy the benefits of reduced cost to maintain an email server with reliable and high available system. You can get this entire guarantee in writing through a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

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Introduction

Growing SMBs should definitely concentrate on their core competencies. Though email is a critical application which helps to drive business, it is not related to the product and services that you are offering to your customers.

In other words, reduce the cost of running the business/resources in order to bring revenue. I have seen that many SMBs are making mistakes by engaging their resources to maintain the organization’s IT infrastructure, namely, CRM, e-mail, Pabx, etc at the expense of its talented human resources who are supposed to be working on its core competencies. We all must agree that these are the cornerstone of running a business in today’s world, and look for alternative methods for managing IT.

What’s next?

For many companies, this is a key transformation phase in terms of IT infrastructure because they realize expenses in managing IT inside the company with its own people. Therefore, an outsourcing company will be a better choice - better service than in-house at lower cost, minimum complexities and you will be able to allow your staff to increase  productivity.

Out of all the IT components, the email server should be the first choice of any company which can be outsourced - by doing so, complete operations will be done by this outsourcing company (Exchange Hosting Providers). Now these hosters will have to take control of certain tasks such as regulatory compliance, systems integration, Upgrade, patches, migration, implement cutting edge features to support a growing business, help-desk, support etc… What peace of mind! Isn’t it?

I met a friend in Singapore yesterday who is running a SM with 3 employees; he is a typical trader who travels a lot. I noticed that he has huge headache in managing his mailbox as well as his employees, is worried about losing data, managing it because they think IT is so complex and has great concerns on time management as his staff needs to concentrate on the trading business rather than mailbox management/backup, etc. He was happy when I suggested Exchange Hosting packages which are as low as $6 per mailbox and decided to go for it.

I want to continue this topic in my next post where I elaborate on the different factors that justify the Exchange Hosting benefits.

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I have been writing exclusively on Exchange Hosting for a while here, I thought its time to mention some basics on Exchange Server itself. Hosting providers in the market are still selling Exchange 2003 based hosting, but most of them have now started offering Exchange 2007 based hosting services.

Lately If you have observed the news on the Internet, Microsoft and Google competition is heating up like anything. Especially, both companies are dominant in the email marketplace, where Microsoft dominates in the Enterprise and Google on the public side. When it comes to Email Hosting, Microsoft still has the market edge where Google already showed tough competition with Google Apps.

Back to the topic, if you are considering Exchange Hosting it is good to know about the current transition from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. This information may not be relevant for an end user, but its a must know for the IT manager or consultant at the infrastructure side. Email with other collaboration tools is going through convergence and has also become a “top mission critical application” for many organizations.

Whats the real difference and benefits you get when your hosting providers replace Exchange 2003 with Exchange 2007?

The below table shows some highlights of the major changes in terms of roles, storage and processing power.

It is obvious that most of the Exchange 2003 customers are staying on the same platform for some more time, while new customers take advantage of Exchange 2007 Hosting. The main reason for this transition delay is due to the fact that effort required to change from 32-bit to 64-bit hardware is higher.

“Standard and Enterprise Edition” in Exchange 2007 has big difference in pricing. So in a 5 role deployment scenario, you can pretty much restrict all the roles , except “Mailbox Server Role”, into Standard Edition. In Exchange 2003, “Standard Edition” was less useful for large organization because it only supports up to 16Gb storage capacity.

Another benefit worth pointing out is the lesser IOPS. With the benefits of 64-bit addressing, it generates only 75% fewer IOPS compared to Exchange 2003 on 32-bit. According to Radicati Group Study, “There will be more than 1.4 billion mailboxes in the year 2007 and that number will grow to 2.2 billion mailboxes in 2009, an average annual rate of 16%.” In another study they mentioned mailbox growth as below,

The above study justifies a move into an Exchange 2007 Hosting environment. Lets move on and see how Exchange 2007 has been improved in business continuity and backup.

In another study as per Meta Group Survey in 2003 “80% of organizations surveyed felt that access to e-mail was more important than the telephone…74% believed being without e-mail would present a greater hardship than losing telephone service.”

Exchange 2007 is full of “Business Continuity” features. Here is a glance,

1. Local Continuous Replication - Using a single server, after logs are committed it ships from the active storage group on one disk system over to a passive copy on a secondary disk system. These logs in secondary system becomes passive copy and can be further backed up using VSS aware backup application.
2. Cluster Continuous Replication - This is using two servers, and based on active/passive MSCS cluster technology. Node #1 is attached to the primary disk system, and after logs committed it ships to the disk (passive copy) attached to the Node#2
3. Standby Continuous Replication - SCR is based on two independent servers in two locations. Very much like CCR, if the first server fails, scripts can be run to switch over to the second server. Each server has its own disk system.
4. Single Copy Clusters (SCC) - This is the same OLD style clustering in Exchange 2003.

Significance of Archiving

Various compliance study estimated that majority of the organization’s intellectual property (IP) located in their email storage. Email is often requested in lawsuits and regulatory investigations. Hence the new regulations now mandate that emails are archived, protected against tampering and unauthorized access, and kept for a certain period, or until specific conditions are met. Here is a nice white paper on “Why organizations need to archive email”

Value additions may even become “Mission Critical”

Continuous research from Microsoft enabled the organization to reach its users beyond email (Outlook client). Some great examples are “Outlook Web Access” (provides browser-based access), “Outlook Mobile or Active-sync” (enabled PDA to connect back to organization Messaging Server) and “Outlook Voice Access” which allows you to listen to your emails from any phone. With unified messaging component and Office communications server, more people begin to telecommuting and eventually, these “value added services” are also become “Mission Critical” component.

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