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

Nationally-Recognized Thought Leader and former BT Counterpane COO, to Help Guide the Growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Network Security Leader

MILFORD, CT – February 12, 2008 – Perimeter eSecurity, the provider of complete security on demand, announced the appointment of Doug Howard to the position of Chief Strategy Officer and President of USA.NET , Perimeter’s wholly-owned subsidiary and a leading provider of secure eMessaging services . As Chief Strategy Officer, Mr. Howard will be responsible for Perimeter’s product strategy including mergers and acquisitions.

“We are very excited to welcome Doug Howard to Perimeter,” said Brad Miller, CEO of Perimeter eSecurity. “Doug’s deep experience in enterprise IT security and secure messaging is a great compliment to our team. I am particularly happy to have such a forward-thinking executive to guide the growth of our service portfolio and our USA.NET subsidiary.”

“I am pleased to have the opportunity to help shape the future strategy of Perimeter eSecurity, a company that is the uncontested leader in the fastest growing sector of the IT security market today, security software-as-a-service ,” said Doug Howard, Chief Strategy Officer, Perimeter eSecurity and President of USA.NET. “Small to mid-sized companies are in the cross hairs of the cyber criminals like never before and to protect themselves they need the complete and affordable security solutions that are available on-demand from Perimeter.

“I also look forward to leading USA.NET, the leading provider of secure eMessaging services for both small and mid-sized companies as well as the Fortune 500. The combination of Perimeter and USA.NET provides the most comprehensive suite of solutions in the industry including Microsoft® Exchange hosting , commercial messaging, AV/SPAM/Content filtering and protection , archiving, secure and encrypted email, secure IM, wireless, integrated SharePoint® services, as well as backup and disaster recovery. I look forward to helping continue USA.NET’s growth trajectory.”

Prior to joining Perimeter, Howard served as Chief Operating Officer of BT Counterpane where he led a team responsible for the development, implementation, operations, and marketing of BT Counterpane’s product and service lines. Earlier he served as Vice President of Security and Business Continuity for AT&T Corp. At AT&T, Doug formed an organization that developed and launched new security services for each of the company’s business lines of service – commercial, government, wholesale and provided direction for the business continuity practice that delivered solutions for AT&T and its clients. Howard started his career in the U.S. Air Force working under the direct command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. After the military, he moved into the private sector and held positions in sales, operations, engineering, product management and business development for Sprint, FLAG Telecom, Telenet, and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). He founded Technology Research International, Inc. in 1989, which was purchased by NBC Broadcasting in 1991. He is currently a member of IEEE, an association for the advancement of technology; the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA); and the Information Assurance Technical Framework (IATF) Forum.

About USA.NET

Cited as the “Top Player” for the hosted business email market for 2006 by The Radicati Group, Inc., USA.NET, The Global Secure eMessaging Service Provider®, is the only hosting provider that is SAS 70 Type II Audited, Microsoft Gold Certified, a member of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program for Exchange 2007/E14, and winner of the 2006 Microsoft Excellence Award for Exchange Hosting Solutions. USA.NET eMessaging solutions are modular and infinitely scalable to ensure customers can grow their business without having to invest additional resources, time or capital into their mission-critical messaging infrastructure. For more information about USA.NET, visit http://www.usa.net .

About Perimeter eSecurity

As the only provider of complete security on demand, Perimeter eSecurity makes security easily available and affordable for all businesses. Perimeter’s on demand security services protect thousands of computer networks nationwide, offering more than 50 different services on a subscription basis in the areas of: Vulnerability Defense, Intrusion Defense, Network Defense, Email Defense, System Defense, and User Defense. With the proliferation of security threats and technologies, clients benefit from a single-source provider that offers all services through one pre-integrated platform and web portal.

Perimeter’s security SaaS services are continuously expanded, enhanced and upgraded for current and future regulatory compliance. With seven geographically distributed technical offices and three redundant data centers, Perimeter’s complete, on-demand and affordable security services are always available and have been validated by multiple independent third parties. For more information about Perimeter visit http://www.perimeterusa.com.

In my previous post here, I was referring to the high availability features in built with Exchange 2007. This got matured over last year as Exchange hosting providers were keen on start offering to the customers. There is always a show stopper though! SP1 was not released at that time…Now with the release of SP1, hosters are excited and can’t wait any more longer. Yes, its in the offering list of hosting providers. You may want to check out the hosting directory here.

As a customer, you may not go in depth in terms of infrastructure requirements, efforts to build this high available solutions, technical expertise etc..Its all taken care by Hosting providers. However, its better to know underlying principles of HA and what type the hosting providers would be offering to you.

Lets get into the CCR (Cluster Continuous Replication) option. Active/Passive - Only one server in the cluster can service users simultaneously. If active node fails, passive node begin to service clients. This is transparent to the end users.

Note that Active/Active clustering is not supported in CCR. Clustering advantages are beyond faster disaster recovery. For example, if you want to shutdown the mailbox server (active node) for emergency maintenance/patch management, you could just fail the active mailbox node to the passive one, then perform the maintenance/patch management on the active node without interrupting exchange services.

Unlike earlier clustering scenario, the two nodes in a CCR do not have to be identical. We can have different specification in each for the two nodes. This will offer an opportunity for flexibility in using qualified servers in the CCR environment as passive nodes - drastic cost saving for both customer and hosting providers. Having mentioned this option, it is customers & hosting providers responsibility to ensure the performance is not sacrificed and SLA is not affected.

Technorati : CCR High_Availability Exchange_Hosting Exchange_Server_2007_SP1 Clustering

Get Two Months Free of Hosted Microsoft^® SharePoint^® and ActiveSync^®

Today’s workplace isn’t a “place” per se, it’s wherever your team is at the moment. With multiple offices, travel, and dispersed workforces, collaboration couldn’t be more important. Microsoft SharePoint and ActiveSync can help you increase productivity and finally achieve collaboration with your team across geographical distances. For a limited time, you can get two months free of both hosted services when combined with Microsoft Exchange Hosting.

What’s the Benefit of Combining Exchange Hosting, SharePoint Services and ActiveSync?

SharePoint provides content management, implements business processes, and supplies easy access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes. USA.NET SharePoint hosting service tightly integrates with our Exchange Hosting services, your web browser and the Outlook 2007 desktop client to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with content, processes, and data. Your entire team will begin to share one central repository with up-to-date documents made possible by check-in/check-out capabilities, version histories, role security and more. Add in Microsoft ActiveSync hosting, which allows you to sync email onto your ActiveSync device, and you have an end-to-end customized solution that meets your email and collaboration needs.

Get one of the first glimpses at USA.NET’s new and improved web site at www.usa.net. It’s chock-full of information about their Microsoft Exchange 2007 Hosting services, hosted SharePoint services and webmail services. The web site details new white papers, webinars, promotions and news as well. Check out the site to get the information you need for your decisions around messaging solutions.

Akamai Technologies has branched out beyond its Web application acceleration services to boost the performance of all IP-based applications.

The Akamai IP Application Accelerator service targets such applications as Voice over IP, live chat, secure file transfers and other non-Web based applications, including those that run the user datagram protocol, IPsec (Internet Protocol security), Secure Sockets Layer as well as the Citrix Independent Computing Architecture, or ICA.

The service is based on technology Akamai acquired with Netli.

“We’re repurposing the Netli technology and taking Akamai’s global footprint and applying it to accelerate IP applications over the Internet,” said Willie Tejada, vice president of application performance solutions at Akamai in San Mateo, Calif.

That combination could address a critical need to accelerate the growing base of mobile applications enterprises are deploying or looking to deploy, said Robert Whiteley, senior analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass.

“With all of the WAN optimization conversations I’m having now, how it applies to mobile users inevitably comes up. That is the prime opportunity—those remote users coming in off the [Virtual Private Network]. It would be possible to serve that with other forms of acceleration, but [those] may not be a more operatically efficient way to do it,” he said.

The Akamai managed service relies on a pair of servers installed at the customer’s data center that is configured, monitored and managed remotely by Akamai. It requires a domain name alias, block of IP addresses and port identification.

The service exploits Akamai’s SureRoute technology, which monitors conditions on the Internet and selects the optimal path to transmit data. When the best path is determined, the Akamai technology then uses the company’s proprietary high performance transport protocol to further reduce response times by reducing the number of round trips required for TCP handshakes. An optional packet loss reduction technique can also be applied where heavier packet loss is experienced on regional Internet links.

Akamai users at AppRiver, a Microsoft Exchange hosting provider, are anxious to start using the service to enable a high availability service for its clients, according to Scott Cutler, executive vice president at the Gulf Breeze, Fla., company.

“To build a high availability hosted Exchange solution, you have to find a way to provide end-to-end Quality of Service. Without Akamai’s acceleration technology, there’s no way to do that. You can have a reliable hosted Exchange platform inside the data center, but your client is somewhere out on the planet and generally a moving target, using wireless connectivity…,” Cutler said. “With 27,000 servers around the Internet with a real-time view of the health of the Internet, they can map the fastest route back to us and use the Akamai communications protocol to speed up the flow of information from the origin to the client.”

To allow customers to see and measure the benefits of the performance optimization, Akamai offers with the service a user management portal that gives customers detailed information, including peak usage levels, the performance of different geographies and views of performance before and after optimization.

The service is available now and is priced on a per user connection basis.

Exchange hosting providers are now offering hosting services based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 to its customers. Most of the customers have been waiting for SP1 before considering a complete move to Exchange 2007 from its previous versions (Exchange 2000/2003).

So what does the customer get as new features? Isn’t it the same old email, outlook web access, and mobile messaging? What else?

More or less the same as far as the basic user is concerned - the same old email, calendar, outlook web access but with a greater level of user experience. To those who run the business rather, IT managers, I would particularly highlight those features in terms of Disaster Recovery, Security and other aspects which could improve business functions. We will get into these new features & enhancements now:

Greater improvement in High Availability - Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) and Local Continuous Replication.

High Availability is really a top-most selling point for Hosting Providers, and every new version of Exchange give a satisfying answer with greater level of improvement. It continues… If you are considering a dedicated exchange server hosting solution, you have two options of high availability - Local Continuous Replication (LCR) & Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR).

LCR is sort of a clone of the production database in the hosted environment, in other words this clone is a redundant mirror of production database and this is stored in independent secondary storage devices. LCR can seamlessly switch to this passive database into active in the event the production server fails.

The CCR option gives the customeran alternate server as a passive node which keeps the mirrored copies of the database. Now customers who actually express the concerns of high availability & uptime, they must choose one of them depending on the cost & business criticality.

In my next post, I would like to write about more features which customers think relevant for business.

Date: Feb. 21, 2008
Time: 2:00 PM ET, 1:00 PM CT, 12:00 PM MT, 11:00 AM PT

Speaker: Steve O’Brien, Sr. Director of Service Development, USA.NET

Enroll Today

Overview: With business decisions resting on what is deemed the most current and accurate information, organizations are recognizing the need for a comprehensive messaging and collaboration solution to keep everyone in sync.

The right solution enables team members to effectively share information and quickly respond to co-workers, business partners and customers. The right solution can also create a significant competitive advantage if it is used to its full capabilities and properly maintained. That’s why businesses of all sizes are evaluating full-featured, enterprise-class solutions like Microsoft Exchange 2007 and SharePoint to meet their business goals. These solutions are very powerful but also complex and costly, so the evaluation process typically includes a strategic analysis of outsourcing.

Join us for this one hour webinar, and you’ll learn:

• The new features in Exchange 2007/Outlook 2007 that directly impact workflow and collaboration
• How SharePoint can boost productivity at all levels in your organization
• Why higher quality outcomes are driven by messaging and collaboration integration
• How a business of any size can strategically acquire the messaging and collaboration infrastructure of a Fortune 50 enterprise with the right hosting provider

Enroll Today

The Situation

Founded in April 2002, AppRiver – based in Gulf Breeze, Florida – is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider offering secure messaging solutions to businesses of all sizes. In addition to spam and virus protection, the company provides a complete managed service for Microsoft® Exchange. With more than 25,500 customers around the world – and an impressive 97% customer retention rate since its inception – AppRiver is one of the largest email security managed service providers worldwide. In 2006, Red Herring magazine named AppRiver one of 10 private security companies to watch, and more recently the company was named to CRN Magazine’s 2007 Emerging Tech Dynamos list.

The Challenge

With a goal of delivering a high-quality service to all of its customers – no matter where they are located – AppRiver has always understood the importance of ensuring consistent application responsiveness and performance. That philosophy is even more essential when it comes to delivering a mission-critical application such as email. As soon as it heard requests for consistent email performance from partners and customers they realized a high availability Hosted Exchange solution was not possible without reaching beyond the data center. The link between the client and their information must behave in a more reliable, deterministic fashion or the customer experience will be inconsistent at best. While providing email to over 4 million mailboxes, we understand the mission critical nature of email and the implications that an unstable connection can create. Whether the client is a 10 person business operating regionally or a 10,000 person organization with a global presence, email availability is paramount. With today’s workforce becoming more mobile, access to email, contacts, calendars and shared resources become even more critical. When accessing this information, their connection must be quick, consistent and reliable.

The Goals

AppRiver needed to meet three key requirements to support its objectives:

• Deliver consistent performance to all customers
  In order to ensure high customer retention rates and grow the hosted Exchange subscriber base, AppRiver must ensure superior performance for its customers around the world.
• Ensure resiliency
  The company wanted to do whatever it could to eliminate support calls related to Internet conditions beyond its control.
• Gain instant scalability
  AppRiver wanted to successfully grow its business without expanding its technology and support infrastructure.

[CALLOUT]
“Regardless of where our customers are, or how they are accessing their email, we can provide an optimized connection between them and their information because of Akamai.”
Scott Cutler, Executive Vice President, AppRiver

Why Akamai

Solving difficult problems

As AppRiver began exploring solutions, it talked to a number of vendors. According to Joel Smith, chief technology officer for AppRiver, “No one understood our needs. We are delivering bulky protocols over the Internet, and it seemed no one had a solution.”

The company considered deploying more servers in more data centers, but even with a modest expansion, the cost would be four times that of the Akamai solution. But this only makes the problem more granular… it doesn’t solve it. i.e. people can be close to their data but if the local connection is stressed, performance will be poor. What was needed was the ability to connect the client with the server using the most efficient route available “at that moment”. Making this decision requires real-time information about the health of the Internet. Akamai’s Real-Time Web Monitor gives a glimpse into the virtual weather map of the internet,” continues Smith.

Consistency around the globe

As AppRiver is well aware, trying to control the link between an email client and server is no small task. In fact, it had discovered that the connection quickly degraded the further users were from the origin server. But, as soon as AppRiver began testing Akamai’s Remote Access Accelerator (RAA) service with some of its clients, it saw immediate improvements.

“With Akamai in place, customers who couldn’t connect are now experiencing a reliable, stable connection. And while start-up connection and synchronization times vary, on average, we are seeing these times cut in half.” says Scott Cutler, executive vice president for AppRiver. “In addition, our support calls related to application availability have decreased by 70 percent.”

Service resiliency leads to happier customers

In spite of the fact that AppRiver maintains multiple tier 1 data centers in the US and Europe, along with bandwidth arrangements with six major network providers, it is unable to avoid the uncontrollable outages that plague the Internet.

“Because the Internet is made up of so many different networks, we are still susceptible to issues with ISPs further downstream. The Akamai solution allows us to be aware of and overcome Internet conditions to deliver a consistent experience,” explains Cutler.

“There is no way around it – there are outages on the Internet every day. And when those outages impact our customers, we get calls. Because of the dynamic routing capabilities of the Akamai network, email is delivered to our customers even in the event of these outages. That means satisfied customers and an end to availability related support calls,” continues Smith.

Supporting growing demands for mobile access

AppRiver was facing the additional challenge of extending reliable, consistent service to a growing proportion of subscribers using mobile devices – including BlackBerries and smart phones – to access email. In addition to often being oversubscribed, cell networks can lose up to 25% of the data packets that traverse their lines. When that happens, mobile devices hang or lose connectivity. Akamai’s RAA service minimizes the adverse performance impact of the cellular network, reduces back traffic on the Exchange system and improves the overall user experience.

“Akamai has made high availability SaaS solutions possible for companies like AppRiver. Email is a critical application for just about every business. There is a lot of evidence that Hosted Exchange providers need to get serious about reliability and availability regardless of where or how their customers connect to their email. No amount of data center expansion will make this possible because the problem is not the number of data centers or the highly controlled environment within the data centers; it’s what happens outside the data center. Businesses large and small are holding SaaS vendors to a higher standard than they demand from their internal IT teams. The availability and reliability we achieve using Akamai’s technology ensures AppRiver meets this standard.” explains Cutler.

Expanding the business instead of its infrastructure

AppRiver isn’t just in business to provide applications – it wants to continue to deliver a superior customer experience and maintain a high customer retention rate. “With Akamai, we can keep our customer satisfaction high and our quality of service consistent – all without expanding our infrastructure,” says Smith.

“Delivering Microsoft Exchange is a challenge for any company – whether an organization is trying to do it in-house or a service provider such as AppRiver is providing it. With Akamai by our side, we can deliver a high-quality, high-availability hosted Exchange service that truly sets us apart.” concludes Smith.

COMPANY

AppRiver, LLC
Gulf Breeze, Florida
www.appriver.com

INDUSTRY

Software & Technology

SOLUTION

Akamai Remote Access Accelerator

KEY IMPACTS

• Delivers a consistent experience to users worldwide
• Reduces volume of support calls
• Gains confidence in delivery to mobile devices
• Helps maintain high customer retention rate

About AppRiver

AppRiver is a privately held provider of business email solutions, including Microsoft Exchange 2003 hosting and spam and virus filtering, with more than 17,000 customers using its managed services and over 25,500 businesses worldwide using its solutions. Founded in 2002, AppRiver is headquartered in Gulf Breeze, Florida. For more information, visit www.appriver.com.

About Akamai

Akamai is the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online. Thousands of organizations have formed trusted relationships with Akamai, improving their revenue and reducing costs by maximizing the performance of their online businesses. Leveraging the Akamai EdgePlatform, these organizations gain business advantage today, and have the foundation for the emerging Web solutions of tomorrow. Akamai is “The Trusted Choice for Online Business.” For more information, visit www.akamai.com.

MONTREAL, (February 7, 2008) – SherWeb, a leading hosting provider of Microsoft Exchange Server and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, proudly announces the availability of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) introduces many new advanced features both on the server side as well as on the client side which enhances the overall Exchange customer experience.

“We are extremely excited to be amongst the first Hosted Exchange companies to be deploying SP1. Microsoft has done a good job in improving its product based on end users’ recommendations and our customers will certainly be pleased with the new features available, especially with OWA. ” states Peter Cassar, CEO of SherWeb. Service Pack 1 facilitates the overall migration of SMB’s from their old Exchange platform to SherWeb’s Hosted Exchange 2007 infrastructure by providing the ability to import Outlook .pst files directly to the exchange server. Moreover, Exchange ActiveSync and Outlook Web Access (OWA) have been enhanced in Exchange Server 2007 SP1. The following are some of the improvements:

SherWeb is the only company in the industry to offer 3 GB of personal disk space for only $8.95 USD per user, per month. To this already generous offer, SherWeb adds many free additional features such as active sync mobile synchronization, advanced anti-spam filtering, the hosting of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and a copy of Microsoft Outlook 2007 software. Proud advocate of the new business trend model that is software plus services, SherWeb offers economical and tailored business class email solution to small, medium and large businesses.

About SherWeb

Founded in 1998, SherWeb is a leader in Internet hosting solutions and provides shared Web hosting services, dedicated servers and hosted messaging and collaboration systems. The company is currently serving thousands of customers from more than 25 countries around the world. SherWeb’s hosting solutions are modular and scalable in order to ensure that customers can grow their businesses without having to invest additional time, capital or other resources into their Web and messaging infrastructure.

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Contact:

Pierre-Olivier Descoteaux
Marketing Director
Solutions SherWeb Inc.
1-888-562-6610 extension 229,
(819) 437-5500 mobile,
www.sherweb.com/exchange