Making the Most of Microsoft Hosted Exchange

Integrating with a cloud-based email management system helps maximise Exchange and safeguards your investment for the long term.

What the business wants

Email is the most common means of business communication, and our ever-increasing reliance upon it presents to any organisation a set of inherent risks. Planned or unplanned downtime, viruses, malware attacks, loss of critical data, and data leakage are just some of the challenges faced by IT administrators. Therefore, rigorous and robust email management is now a business imperative.

A hosted Exchange solution is becoming an increasingly attractive option for many organisations due to its ability tooffer greater flexibility and freedom for the end user, alongside reduced overhead.

Common Challenges Posed by Migration to Hosted Exchange

Outsourcing to a third party may be a straightforward decision and a cost-efficient solution, but businesses need to be confident that the transition itself does not impinge upon day-to-day operations, and that off-premise hosting will deliver on its promise of continuity, accessibility and security.

Hosted Exchange services ensure that administrators are largely freed from the shackles of onerous and time-consuming support, but IT departments still retain responsibility should any outages occur. Consequently, reliability is arguably the most critical facet of any hosted service, and strong SLAs (service level agreements) should always be established.

IN addition, while the evolution of email has proved a boon for business communications, its exponential growth has added layers of complexity to any large scale data migration – particularly with data stored in multiple, disparate locations.

An integrated solution

Any viable and effective email management solution needs to give your organisation the confidence and, moreover, the tools to meet these challenges. It must reduce the administrative burden as well as future-proofing your investment.

The best cloud-based email management solutions can not only safeguard your investment in hosted Exchange services, but also greatly enhance the benefits they promise. An effective solution should integrate seamlessly with the hosted Exchange server, delivering enhanced service availability and a long term archive offering self-service and real time searches, as well ascentralised email retention andsecurity policy management.

Jerry Hook, Manager of Windows Systems at the University of Tennessee Medical Centre, believes he has found the perfect solution in Mimecast’s cloud-based Unified Email Management system:

“At the very beginning, there was uncertainty about placing all of our email management off-site. But the feature set won us over. With one service, we could get not only anti-spam and anti-virus, but also email retention and retrieval, disaster recovery and policy management. I have been dealing with IT vendors for years and it’s very rare for me to find a vendor that I completely trust.Mimecast’s attention to detail, their support and the quality of their people are outstanding. Mimecast does exactly what they said it would do.

“In the past, I’d estimate we spent at least 40 hours a month on administration of email management, with much of that on anti-spam. Since moving to Mimecast, our administrative