HOW TO ARTICLE: Avoid The Pain and Downtime when Upgrading to Exchange 2010

Three_Steps_to_Migrating_to_Exchange_2010_Oct10.pdf

Mimecast+Exchange+Migration_Computing+whitepaper.pdf

The Issue Today:

Isn’t it a little crazy that business leaders up and down the land are following the governments austerity lead and running through their budgets with a large knife, while at the same time wagging their finger at the poor IT department and warning that business continuity for critical systems has never been more important?

In reality the money is not likely to be available today to protect all the business systems, Business Continuity is not DR and is typically a great deal more expensive to implement and manage. The trick is to focus on what keeps your business ticking and this is 99% of the time your Email Servers. Assuming that you have a good and tested DR solution in place for your critical applications all ready (…and you really should – if you don’t we can help – call us on 01189070070) then you ought to be able to recover within 24-48 Hrs to a point where normal business processes can resume.

What no business can afford in today’s hectic world is to lose email communication. Its the life blood of modern business enabling literally Billions of mobile devices around the world to become the average employee’s window into their working day.

So this creates two big headaches, how do we deliver an Microsoft Exchange upgrade non-disruptively when the time comes & how do we ensure that Exchange Email services never fail?

The Cost Effective Solution:

On top of the above challenges we can’t forget that we also need to do all this on a tight budget…
The key to this solution is the reapportioning of budget you are all ready spending in order to squeeze more value out of it. Obviously to do this you need to know what you are spending first.
The place to start is to gather up all the annual costs relating to your email Anti Virus, Security and Spam Filtering software or hardware appliances, work out how much they cost you in annual renewals and depreciation.

Next take a good look at your email server and work out “roughly” how much data in there is junk or needs to be archived, the average in our experience is between 60% and 80%, from here you need to look at how much this costing you to run on primary storage and again “roughly” and how much money you could claw back if you archived all this data.
The final piece of information is centred on how much faster your backups will complete with 80% less email data and consequently how many tapes a year you now don’t need to buy?

Once you have a rough annual cost for all of the above you can offset it against a quote for Mimecast’s Unified Email Management Service which includes an Archiving and Filtering Service. This service sits between your email servers and and the Internet capturing all your email as it passes through. this means your users can delete email they don’t need safe in the knowledge its securely archived, they can recover it very easily using a simple plug-in Mimecast have written for Outlook or via a Web Browser Tool.

It is even possible to export all your old email and have this “ingested” by Mimecast into your archive, allowing you to claw back that valuable storage and backup resource. As an added bonus you can also control what information is leaving your business via email using Data Leak Prevention features. The whole email store can easily be searched for compliance and e-discovery purposes.

The real value though is that Mimecast also offers Email Continuity and it is this simple function that will deliver the answer to our two issues.

If your email server fails the Mimecast Plug-In will notice and ask for permission to take over. If the user clicks yes then the Plug-In will connect to Mimecast and securely download the users email. Alternatively if the user has been sent home because the downed server issue is linked to building wide problem then they can log into the web client and read/respond to new email just as easily.
So, your users are protected from server and building outages and there has been no large capital investment in clustering your mail server or the complex management required to look after such a setup. You simply rerouted your email through a third party service provider and installed an Outlook Plug-In.

At the point where you need to plan and execute your Exchange upgrade you now also have a simple and bullet proof way of ensuring your users can get to their email while you cut over. You can cut over to the Mimecast service for mail delivery to Outlook, carry out your Exchange upgrade or rip and replace Exchange 200* for Exchange 2010 all while your users have access to their email.

What to do next?

Well, the most obvious question is how much is Mimecast going to cost for your business, and we can help with that. Simply call or email one of our sales team on 01189070070/sales@letn.co.uk and they will be happy to help.

Alternatively if you would prefer to do some more reading on the subject we have below two free documents that go into a lot more detail, please drop us a line if you would like to speak to an IT Manager who has already implemented this service.

Three_Steps_to_Migrating_to_Exchange_2010_Oct10.pdf

Mimecast+Exchange+Migration_Computing+whitepaper.pdf

About Mimecast

Mimecast is a leading provider of essential cloud services for Microsoft Exchange. Mimecast delivers enterprise email management services that include security, continuity and archiving. This suite of services provides total end-to-end control of business email, while minimising risk and reducing both cost and complexity. Mimecast Services integrate with an organization’s existing IT, whilst offering complete control to the IT administrator and takes just hours to set up. Every day Mimecast takes care of millions of emails and documents for thousands of companies around the world, which is why 60% of the top 100 UK law firms have switched to Mimecast.