When evaluating an email migration, examining the pricing and characteristics of Exchange 2013 and Office 365 is very important.
Basic Deployment Scenarios
- On premises Exchange Server Development
Organization host many exchange servers and gives the related technical assistance in house or through other support organization, by studying conventional deployment model. For any things like, Backup and disaster recovery organization are responsible. - Cloud Deployment
The organizations, who don’t want to manage their Exchange server environments, a cloud deployment option exists for them. Backups, disaster recuperation, hardware and antivirus security etc. are handled by Microsoft. - Hybrid Deployment
Hybrid approach is a combination of Exchange server on-premises and office 365 cloud. While Outsourcing other fields, who want to keep a bit of command in some fields of their mail server infrastructure they can use hybrid approach. It may improve performance of the entire mail infrastructure by dividing the risk and cost. An organization can select to situate some mailboxes in cloud and drop others on premises.
Many deployment models vary in features of functionality for Exchange 2013 and it’s important to know these differences when deciding whether your organization should migrate Exchange 2013 on-premises or Exchange online.
Feature Comparison between Exchange online and On-premises exchange
| Exchange 2013 | Exchange Online | |
|---|---|---|
| Service Features | ||
| Message size Limits (Max Size) | Configurable | 25MB |
| Recipient Limits | Configurable | 1,500 recipients per day |
| Message Rate Limits | Configurable | 30 messages per minute |
| Client Access | ||
| Outlook Online Mode | Yes | Yes (Not recommended) |
| Outlook Web app: Session time out | Configurable | 6 hours (Default) |
| Mobility | ||
| Certificate Based authentication for Exchange active sync | Yes | Yes |
| Email or Inbox | ||
| Catch all mailbox | Yes | No |
| Contacts or Directory | ||
| Custom Address List | Yes | No |
| Hierarchical Address List | Yes | No |
| Global Address List Segmentation | Yes | No |
| Administration | ||
| Public Folders | Yes (new concept of public folder mailboxes) | No |
| Security | ||
| Antivirus | Customer chooses antivirus or antispam solution | Forefront online protection for exchange |
| Antispam | Customer chooses antivirus or antispam solution | Forefront online protection for exchange |
Exchange on premises Vs. Office 365 pricing
Consider active factors like applicable factors and functionality, when assessing a move to office 365. Ultimately the decision is to lower the cost.
Before taking decision to outsource, it’s necessary to know the current cost model for email delivery. After that only, can exactly evaluate how much you may save by migrating. Some organizations find hard to decide the email infrastructure cost, but generally cost per user is known as a major format.
Evaluate the following to calculate per user cost,
- Hardware Cost.
- License Cost.
- Storage per user cost.
- Staff time cost to support the mail administration.
Other things to consider in Office 365
Office 365 is not only an email communication platform but also supports connection to lync, sharepoint and office application suite which involves Excel and Word. Organization could get real value form migrating to the cloud if user wants those products where those are available prepackaged.
It may be complicated and valuable to set up on-premises and to integrate with Exchange for lync and sharepoint. After moving to the cloud, they have access to these services but no need of turning them on right away.
Drawbacks of using sharepoint and lync in the cloud include exchange online also and it involves ownership of data, safety and sight. If the service is not available they may lose access to their information base.
Dispelling common hosted Exchange email myths
Misinterpretations of hosted exchange email
- Moving to hosted email may lead to lose visibility of data.
A statement is false as users can clearly see their data on every day basis and if they follow the hybrid approach they have a choice to move back the data between local exchange server and the cloud. If user moves to hosted exchange email model they never lose the control on their data, it will be situated in place which is not used by user. - Hosted email has less security
This statement is not so true, although it brings up an interesting point. Most providers of hosted email have greater control over the security of their systems and that is what a business can provide locally. But the concern here should be actually finding out how secure communication between your hosting company and client endpoints is. For example, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) which is used in many cases is more secure than providing Outlook Web App access externally. - Hosted email doesn’t have reliability
Actually, no computer system is 100% reliable and when you use cloud, your own focus will change to redundant network links from high availability for your own mail servers.
Providers such as Microsoft, have made considerable investments in uptime with Office365. Their business being successful depends on their ability to deliver on their promises to provide optimal services. These investments are likely to be more than what other organizations afford on their own. Hence reliability problems are not occurring often and is usually solved quickly. - Using hosted email leads to disappear all administrative tasks and problems
Well this is also not true either. Even a hosted Exchange email deployment requires a certain degree of administration for account management and for maintaining the organization’s cloud environment.
Thus, business which wants to reduce administrative overhead and costs should be aware of it. Compare to an on-premises Exchange setup there are fewer demands but requirement of administration is must and it should not be denied (treated as unworthy).
Comparing Office 365 pros and cons with Exchange 2013, hybrid setups
Exchange 2013 on-premises pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Company will have the whole control of their environment like hardware software, backups and recover and also can manage the mailbox allocation. For each user they can control the size of the mailbox and size of sent and received messages. Also, can integrate with any third-party product with their environment. | It can be costlier to organizations as they own and control all the software and hardware. As they deploy a high availability environment which expands across the many data centers, they should have highly skilled ones within their organization to maintain all of those. It needs a broad understanding of windows clustering, networking, exchange database log relay while running high availability-based infrastructure. |
|
Organization maintains all security within their environment and they have complete knowledge about the email data, where it’s situated and who is accessing it as it will be under their view. They have the complete rights to schedule their own windows maintenance for upgrades as the uptime is in their area. Exchange 2013’s related features and functionalities will be available. And as the infrastructure is close, accessing speed is favorable with onsite scenarios. |
To move between cumulative updates, environment maintenance and performing all needed planning is required. |
Office 365 pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| On hardware and software, organization can reduce overall investments and revenue costs. | When data is out of organization view, then they no longer can control or handle their data. |
| Administration costs and ongoing staffing can be reduced by the organization. | Some email messages will already be transmitted and stored in certain way, if the organization has strict data security rules. As the data lie in many numbers of data centers in and around the world it may not be able to meet requirement if you migrate to office 365. |
| Operation time is assured to be 99.9% and it’s financially supported. | While Integrating other business system to your environment, achieving anything will be limited when compared to hosting yourself. |
| Connection possible from almost everywhere. | As business grows subscription cost will not be in control. |
| The overall subscription cost of deployment includes hygiene and other third-party services. | Integrating your data back into organization is not clear if the contract is terminated. |
Hybrid deployment pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Allows to maintain some extent of control on security, data and integration. | It’s complex to setup and manage, and it doesn’t allow to instantly hold savings regards to software, staff and hardware costs. |
| For large environments, allows for staged migrations in a manageable pace by allowing to enlarge a utility model where the yearly expense is proportional to the number of mailboxes | Because of paying for both in-house and off-site infrastructure it’s more expensive. |
| Without executing all user base, it allows to assess hosted exchange services. | Gives incompatible feature set and mixed economy. In-house users will have the benefits whereas others will not have in cloud. |