Hosted Exchange vs In-House IT

Transcription

1 Hosted Exchange vs In-House Why move your communication to the cloud.

2 Contents Executive summary 3 In-House is best 3 Let s get the money bit out of the way first 4 Technology Advances 4 Hidden costs 5 Security and compliance 5 Availability, mobility and support 6 More than , much much more 6 About Cobweb 7 About the Author Matthew Hall is a senior technology advisor, and is the archival innovation lead at Cobweb Solutions Limited. Since joining Cobweb in 2006, Matt has helped 100 s of businesses move their to the cloud. Through scoping sessions and working with clients to understand their requirements, he helps businesses comply with both legal requirements as well as advising on best practice for cloud solutions. 2

3 Executive summary Let s get the money bit out of the way The purpose of this document is to help you decide whether to outsource your to a third party or to run your infrastructure yourself. Let s be honest and upfront from the start. This document has been created by a service provider. Not any service provider but the UK s oldest, and biggest independent service provider, who have been providing hosted Microsoft Exchange for businesses since However, this is not the only thing you need to consider when reviewing your options, your IT advisor whether it be your in-house experts or trusted advisor are not impartial, they have as much vested interest in your business deploying more and more technology, the more you deploy the more your business needs them. The more you deploy the more your business needs IT advisors. This document attempts to share some real world views of the challenges when managing your business communications in an ever changing fast paced business environment and help you make an informed decision to ensure you make the right choice. Once again, we don t apologise if we are slightly biased, but with 6000 customers and over 150,000 worldwide users we think we have a great alternative proposition that simply has to be considered! From experience we know that customer who opt to use a hosted provider will see both direct and indirect cost savings. Sometimes the direct costs alone are a signifificant enough motivation to make the jump, but when companies start to look at some of the indirect savings such as electricity or claims for overtime to fix unplanned outages, the overall impact on the bottom line becomes apparent. The other major benefit is the predictability of cost, this actually is the single reason like-for-like comparisons are so difficult. With a hosted solution, you pay for what you need at an agreed fixed price and that covers everything you need to run and consume the service. So if you have a new employee join the business, the exact cost of adding them to the service is very easy to forcast and very easy to allocate. What we typically see in comparisons with in-house is although the obvious costs are accounted for (the server, licencing, planned upgrades) what we rarely see included are the incidental or real-world costs (back-up, filtering and anti-virus, in-life hardware replacement). Below is an example of a travel company who after a successful campaign for summer holidays employed several new staff in June to cope with demand. If they had stayed in-house the hardware the hardware would have to be upgraded to cope with the influx of new users. Because the recruitment was reactionary to a sudden uplift in business, the IT department would get very little notice that the work has to be done, so most of the work has to be completed in paid overtime. It is likely however a Hosting provider can deliver improvements in feature sets, compliance, reliability and performance, especially if you re on an older, troubleprone system, or if resources are hard to come by. In the following sections we will come back to costs and provide some real world examples of comparisons. In-house IT can cause cash-flow spikes even if costs are the same over the year. Profile of Cash Cost - In House vs Hosted In House Costs Hosted Costs Jan Dec 3

4 In-House is best Hidden costs John Seely Brown was the chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and the Director of its Palo Alto Research Centre and he said, The harder you fight to hold on to a specific assumption, the more likely there s gold in letting go of them. So, don t allow your preconceived notions of hosted messaging to hold you back from embracing a new way. What we shall explore in this section is some of the challenges in ensuring your company. Technology Advances At Cobweb we have been through five versions of Microsoft Exchange including Exchange 2013, which we were first in the world to launch. As with all Microsoft technology refreshes some are better than others, but it is in the field of messaging we are going to see some significant feature set changes over the next few releases. These will be driven by the changing way that we are using communications particularly the rapid expansion and convergence of home and work networking environments, social trends towards home and mobile working, and the ever increasing volumes of communications. Don t allow your preconceived notions of hosted messaging to hold you back from embracing a new way. The integration of voice into the communications tools, the proliferation of new devices and dispersed working will mean that the tools that we use will have to become more flexible and more secure. For instance, if your laptop or phone gets lost or stolen you will need to be able to get back to a previous state in minutes not days. This means the complexity of configuration, management and support will continue to grow over shorter and shorter periods of time increasing the IT workloads for inhouse staff or ever rising costs of IT support and consultancy. Many companies do not understand the true, hard costs of their messaging systems and don t see them, for example this could be the cost of holiday cover or overtime for the administrator, so if the system goes down at 8pm everyone will just have to wait until next day before it comes up again. Another example would be the provision of resources for a mission critical but normally not strategic service like , pulling that resource away from more important strategic IT initiatives that will drive revenue and innovation. By resources I mean people or cash and probably both. Another hidden cost is the true cost of downtime. It is quite normal for an organisation that has a TCO for their messaging system to have costs that are far below the industry average, and uptime that is far above the industry average! When talking to companies we find that it s blatantly obvious that most companies do not understand the true, hard costs of their messaging systems, nor do they accurately measure their downtime which is a very real cost. Getting down to the detail is often the case that costs for management and monitoring software to make sure that the system stays up and running and to send alerts if it doesn t is not included and this can have disastrous consequences. Some of the other areas to consider might be; Server and the amortization of that over its useful life. Backup hardware and the amortization of that over its useful life. Software licenses. Maintenance /yr. If an in-house person wasn t doing this, what else would/could they be doing for your company (duties)? Disaster Recovery Plan consultant fees. Other software costs: backup software, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam etc. Expect the unexpected and add in possible future events if it goes down, what are ALL of your ACTUAL downtime costs. And add in IT firm support costs per incident this can add up quickly when someone s charging you real money to fix something. Finally on this subject, if you are investing in new hardware, what about the cost of the capital expense. Could your company cash be used more effectively? To pay down debt, invest in revenue generating IT or perhaps a nice bonus? 4

5 Security and compliance I have had many conversations about security of data in my time at Cobweb and whilst many organisations do take data security very seriously it becomes a little bit of a joke if your servers that hold your critical confidential business are in an unlocked room next to the cupboard where the backups are stored. But proper IT security has to be multi layered. The physical layer The Software layer Most small and medium businesses who manage their own Microsoft Exchange servers do so out of a corporate office. Servers are typically kept in a server closest or computer area, often protected by just a single locked door. While businesses often feel more comfortable keeping servers within eye sight inside their own offices. Every year, thousands of businesses experience theft, burglary or trespass, resulting in the damage or loss of computer hardware and ultimately their server. Software has got more robust in recent years, patching has become easier and vulnerabilities are well publicised and are able to be dealt with in a timely way; however that said it is still a nightmare to manage. Lots of businesses handle these workloads very well many more don t. Logical Server Security The Perimeter s are only as secure as the servers they reside on. To properly protect your sensitive data, the Exchange servers must be properly secured. This complicated, ongoing continuous process includes: Proper Microsoft Windows server operating system installation and hardening configuration Prompt testing and application of important security patches and updates to the operating system. Strict configuration of user and administrative accounts with roles and permissions. Proactive monitoring of the servers and services for viruses, intrusions, and any unexpected behaviours such as DoS attacks and intrusion attempts. Minimising Spam and eliminating inbound born viruses is an essential part of any business communications strategy. The potential damage to a business, from a critical failure of IT systems to the time wasting element of spam the battle draws new lines and intensifies on a year on year basis. Businesses have a duty of care to protect employees from unpleasant content and so good perimeter protection is a must. You cannot leave this to chance. Unfortunately, most small and medium businesses do not have the necessary experience or resources to allocate towards these tasks, thus creating exploitable vulnerabilities that compromise the security of their . 5

6 Availability, mobility and support More than , much much more More and more business are relying on new ways of working to become more competitive, I hear the expression more from less all the time now and having good IT systems can make the vision a reality. At Cobweb we take always available, access anywhere, on almost any device, for granted. Businesses need to be able to offer the corporate refugees or generation X employees the power of the choice of working and hardware and software to be effective. We take always available, access anywhere, on almost any device, for granted. Minimum levels expected include the ability to work from home or away from the office, free up your dead time (travelling, waiting for meetings etc) and work securely on your device of choice, laptop, netbook, Iphone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile device. Deploying, supporting and securing these devices is normally beyond the realms of the small and medium business and the consequences of failing to offer flexible forms of working can be severe. In the US a rising trend is Bring your own laptop whilst this can make business more agile it adds to the headache of administrators as they struggle to maintain security policies. In addition, offering a full administrator and user support environment is normally impracticable for many businesses, so users are left to their own devices and can spend hours trying to get their IT to work. Our customers tell us that they halve user support in managed service scenarios. Cloud, SaaS, Managed Services, Outsourcing, there is no doubt that the IT delivery models are changing. Price commoditisation will drive business online as the IT giants slog it out in the cloud to maintain and win market share. All sizes of business will start to adopt a Cloud-first strategy but many won t be sure how to start, who to partner with and what services to pilot first. Often it won t be the obvious issues that will become a challenge. Drivers such as cost reduction, increased operating efficiencies, CapEx to OpEx strategies, will ensure that the cloud computing delivery model is successful and businesses will need to adopt the model at some point. Buying hardware and software licenses now is like buying a 20 year old car, it might be cheaper up front but in the long term it will be more expensive to maintain, more unreliable, less green and not upgradeable in the future. Buying hardware and software licenses now is like buying a 20 year old car. I hope that this short document has given you food for thought? I have not set out to answer all your question, or provide all the answers, but I do hope that you will consider your IT strategy in the light of some of the issues raised and be more informed to make the decisions that are right for your business. 6

7 The biggest independent Hosted Exchange provider in Europe, Cobweb Solutions is delivering a range of hosted communication tools to more than 6,000 small and medium-sized business customers. Since its formation in 1996 as an Application Service Provider, Cobweb has been a pioneer in providing Microsoft Exchange as a Hosted Service. As a result this has given us invaluable experience and knowledge to offer our customers a specialist service that is both simple and reliable. Putting customer service at the forefront of our company philosophy, Cobweb uses a tailored approach to understand our customer s requirements and will accommodate these needs to make sure there is a solution that fits your budget. We also recognises that technology is only as good as the human behind it and so we provide UK-based telephone support to ensure there is always a trained professional just a phone call away. Customer reassurance is one of Cobweb s priorities and service uptime is guaranteed by the financially-backed SLA (Service Level Agreement) provided to all customers. Extending our customer focus further still, Cobweb continually concentrates its efforts on researching, creating and adapting technical solutions, and strongly believes in making investments that will benefit its customers. Only five per cent of Microsoft Partners worldwide can distinguish themselves as having a competency, and Cobweb is proud of its two Gold status in Microsoft s Messaging and OEM categories. We also have one of only a small number of worldwide MVPs (Microsoft Most Valued Professionals) and a variety of qualified MCPs (Microsoft Certified Professionals) as part of our team, which gives customers the confidence that we at Cobweb can resolve any technical issues they may face. This close partnership with Microsoft is critical to the success of the company s services. London, United Kingdom One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, Level 42, London, UK, E14 5AB