Is Hosted Exchange Ready for Your Business?
Email is the primary means of exchanging business communications both internally with employees and externally with clients and business partners. It's also your calendar and scheduler. It's how you stay connected when traveling or working remotely, either through web mail or mobile device support. It serves as a document exchanger and, in many cases, a massive filing cabinet for company memos, presentations, and other important documents. Maybe you've implemented unified communications (UC) through Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 so that Exchange also acts as your company PBX and voice mail system.
Exchange Server can be your company's complete communications hub. An immediate question, then, is can you retain all this functionality if you outsource your messaging infrastructure? A quick scan of the marketplace shows there are many hosting providers, including Microsoft itself, that offer Exchange as a hosted service. Some smaller providers don't include every feature of Exchange, particularly more advanced features such as UC. But there are plenty of providers that offer the full-featured Exchange package, so if that's what you need, you'll be able to find it. Vendors distinguish themselves by the additional services they provide.
Hosted providers offer service level agreements (SLAs) that spell out what sort of uptime the service guarantees as well as what penalty the provider will pay if it fails to meet its uptime commitment. Most large providers offer something in the range of 99.9 percent to 99.999 percent uptime; this number might vary depending on whether you subscribe to the provider's standard service or if you upgrade to a dedicated server option. 123Together.com began offering a 100 percent uptime guarantee for its dedicated Exchange hosting option two years ago; Apptix recently began offering a 100 percent uptime guarantee for its Apptix OnDemand hosted Exchange service. With the massive data centers that are possible and the improved high-availability story through continuous replication in Exchange 2007, I wouldn't be surprised to see more service providers begin offering a 100 percent uptime guarantee.
Basic security, antivirus, antispam, and some level of support or Help desk are usually included at no additional fee, and often you can pay extra for premium services in these areas. Most hosted services also give you the option to pay for extra services: email archiving; mobile device support, including Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone, and others; and fax support through email are common add-ons. Larger Exchange hosting services can provide SharePoint and Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as well.