If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:
- Saying Goodbye to On-Premises Exchange (Part 2)
- Saying Goodbye to On-Premises Exchange (Part 3)
- Saying Goodbye to On-Premises Exchange (Part 4)
- Saying Goodbye to On-Premises Exchange (Part 5)
- Saying Goodbye to On-Premises Exchange (Part 6)
- Saying Goodbye to On-Premises Exchange (Part 7)
Introduction
For many of us, our Exchange server is like a long-time friend with whom we have a bit of a love/hate relationship. You know the friend I’m talking about: the one with whom you share so many memories dating all the way back to high school, or even childhood. You’ve been through a lot together and you love him/her dearly - but the older you get, the less you have in common and the more annoying your friend’s habits seem to become. Sometimes you wonder if it’s time to cut back on the visits and spend more time with some of the new people you’ve met, who seem to have more to offer.
The evolution of email
When we started our small business, those many years ago, we used the email services of our ISP. We had POP accounts that downloaded our mail to our local computers, which worked fine back in those dinosaur days when I only had one desktop computer and did all of my computing there. Even in the ‘90s, though, mobility was the up-and-coming thing. The Internet went from being an expensive and difficult-to-set-up luxury enjoyed by the elites and the geeks to an almost ubiquitous phenomenon.
Laptops became more portable and more affordable. Hotels and other venues started offering Internet connectivity to customers. Wi-fi came along and made it easy to get online no matter where you might be. Meanwhile, my little tech consulting and writing business was thriving. POP mail didn’t cut it anymore. It was difficult to synchronize my messages across all my machines, and my mail could be (and was) lost if the computer to which it had downloaded experienced a hardware failure or the operating system went bottoms up (as happened all too frequently back then).
A more than fair Exchange
So we set up our own Exchange server in a small Windows domain. Sure, the whole setup was much more complex than we really needed for a two-person company, and it was a lot of work, but we were writing about enterprise-level technology so it made sense to run our own network that way, to get the real day-to-day immersion in it that goes beyond the test labs. And there were big advantages to having our own mail server instead of depending on an ISP or hosting service to provide our email services.
With Exchange, we could keep all of our mail in one place, on the server, and access it from anywhere, with just about any device, using ActiveSync or OWA. We had several domain names registered and we could create email aliases to get our mail in one inbox from different addresses with different domain names (for example, mail sent to deb@domainone.com and mail sent to debra.shinder@domaintwo.net all came into my same inbox, and I could then filter it into different folders if I wanted).
We could also sync our calendars and share them with each other, it was easy to sync contacts across devices, etc. We could exchange meeting requests with each other and with others. We could share, delegate and assign tasks. Best of all, it was easy to automatically back up our mail, calendars and contacts and filter for spam at the server level. With our own email server, we were able to control the limits on our mailbox size (within what each version of the software allowed) rather than being restricted to an arbitrary size set by a provider.
We have loved, cherished and nurtured our Exchange server for over fifteen years now. We’ve seen it through two physical moves to new locations, we’ve transitioned it from a physical server to a virtual machine, we’ve upgraded its hardware and we’ve updated to new versions of the software. Our Exchange server has, in keeping with its name, served us well.
However, as with any close and dependent relationship, there have been some ups and downs along the way. Although Exchange has been pretty stable since the last upgrade, for a while there we would have periodic outages when it rebooted and didn’t start back up correctly. We’ve also lost power a few times over the last couple of years, and it was frustrating to be unable to communicate via my primary email account during those times (I would have to shift to a web mail account such as outlook.com or gmail – which was okay for my outgoing mail but of course most people were sending mail to my main account so I didn’t get it until our power was back; luckily the outages never lasted more than a few hours).
Then there’s the regular patching that has to be done. Even when it’s handled automatically, there can be problems – including software conflicts resulting in crashes or undesirable behavior that we then have to spend hours of our time troubleshooting. And there is also the ongoing expense of running the server. Recently, we’ve started wondering whether it’s time to call it quits with our high-maintenance friend.
Now, this has nothing to do with the “demise” of email that has been predicted by some tech pundits for the last half a decade. While it might be true that much of the discussion that used to take place via Listserve lists has moved to social networking web sites such as Facebook, and while it might also be true that youngsters today use social sites and text messaging for personal communications that we oldies once accomplished via email, the business world is still very dependent on email for a number of reasons: security/encryption, more control over distribution, the advantages of non-real time communications that give people time to think over what they’re saying and revise until they get it right, and more.
It’s not that we want to stop using email. It’s also not that we want to stop using Exchange for our email. It’s that we’re thinking seriously about letting someone else do the work for a change.
Pros and cons
Cloud-based computing has gained momentum over the past few years. Through it all, I’ve embraced the cloud in some ways and in others, I’ve been a stubborn holdout. Email services was one of the latter. Like so many other network admins, we just didn’t want to give up control.
Hosted Exchange has been an option for quite some time, but there were always some serious drawbacks. One of the biggest obstacles in considering any online service, for me, was always the possibility that the hosting company would go out of business and leave me high and dry, without my data. After all, such a thing wasn’t unprecedented. A number of the consumer cloud services have shut down. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen to companies offering services to small businesses? Another problem is that, a few years ago, hosted email services were more expensive and not necessarily reliable.
With the advent of Office365, things have changed. Microsoft itself is the host, so there’s not much worry about the company suddenly going out of business without warning (although there is some justified concern that if the online service doesn’t bring in enough revenue, the company might kill it – as it has pulled the plug on services and products in the past. However, all indications are that Microsoft is “all in” with its cloud productivity services and according to a recent report from Business Insider, companies are “jumping on Office 365 like crazy” and it can now be considered a bona fide success.
That’s great from Microsoft’s point of view, but looking at it from the other side, how would making the switch from on-premises Office 365 to its hosted counterpart make life easier for me?
The benefits for my small business are somewhat different from those of a large organization. An enterprise might be able to significantly reduce personnel costs by moving IT functions such as email to the cloud, but my husband and I are the IT department for my company and we don’t get paid to do it anyway. Likewise, we aren’t going to make big reductions in the amount of office space we have to rent by ditching our on-premises servers, the way a big company might. Our server room is a spare bedroom in our home, and while we might be able to use the space for something else, we won’t be saving any money by moving the computers out.
On the other hand, there are some very real cost savings that we could reap by letting go of our Exchange server (and some of our other servers). Electricity usage, cooling the room (those big machines generate a lot of heat in the summer time), buying new hardware from time to time, and so forth – it all adds up. And not having to ever worry about buying a new server machine (or replacement hard drives and other parts) is certainly an attractive proposition.
In addition, we’ve all heard the old adage that “time is money” and maintaining servers takes up quite a bit of time – especially when something goes wrong (and something is always going to go wrong now and then). The time spent troubleshooting all the problems that can occur – storage sizing issues, permissions issues, policy conflicts, backup issues, DNS problems and so forth – could be better spent doing things that bring in money, or at least are more enjoyable.
But perhaps the most important thing and the primary reason we’re looking to migrate our email to the cloud is a simple lifestyle issue. We know the cloud providers can’t guarantee that there will never again be any down time – although it’s certain that Microsoft and other large providers can invest in higher quality and more redundant equipment than we will, and will most likely have a faster response team if things go wrong and get everything back up and running as quickly or faster than we could. The key, though, is that server problems will no longer be our responsibility. We might be without email just as long, but while it’s being fixed, we can be doing other things instead of spending time trying everything to fix it ourselves. The alleviation of the stress that causes is worth the price of admission all by itself.
Summary
For many long years, I was one of the most adamant supporters around of keeping email on-premises. I said you could take my Exchange server when you pried it from my cold, dead hands. But circumstances, priorities and people change. Slowly, over the last year, after testing the waters and examining all of the evidence objectively, I’ve come around. The cloud has won me over. In Part 2 of this article, I’ll discuss how to make the move from on-premises Exchange to Office 365 as painless as possible.
If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:
