Resilient Messaging, Improved Discovery in Exchange Server 2010

Read our latest industry news where Jerod Powell, CEO / Co-Founder discusses the benefits of Exchange Server 2010...

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Published by: Internet.com
Written by: Lynn Haber

As the cornerstone of Microsoft’s Unified Communications solution, Exchange Server now offers customers new integrated e-mail archiving and retention and discovery features to preserve and discover information, even as the volume of e-mail skyrockets at organizations of every size. 
 
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 ups the ante for data protection when compared to previous versions. As the cornerstone of Microsoft’s Unified Communications solution, Exchange Server now offers customers new integrated e-mail archiving and retention and discovery features to preserve and discover information, even as the volume of e-mail skyrockets at organizations of every size.

Best of all, businesses that adopt Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 will find critical tools to help them meet compliance and e-discovery requirements without having to change the way they work, while at the same time reducing IT costs and improving risk management. New features for archiving, retention, and discovery in Exchange 2010 include: personal archive, retention policies, legal hold, single item restore, multi-mailbox search, and role-based access control.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, together with SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office, FAST Search, and Unified Communications, is a vital component of The Microsoft E-Discovery Framework, which helps organizations with their e-discovery readiness.

Additional product enhancements in Exchange Server 2010 also address high-availability, disaster recovery, and back up. Out-of-the-box features in Exchange 2010 will help companies save money and increase productivity, reliability, and resiliency.

Get Control of Your E-Mail

There's no doubt about it, organizations need to get control of e-mail: what they have, where it is, the ability to search and retrieve, as well as save records for appropriate periods of time and delete messages they don't need.

"Company e-mail isn't going away, and the risks associated with non-compliance are getting worse," says Mark Diamond, president and CEO of Contoural Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based technology consultancy that specializes in helping organizations achieve litigation readiness.

Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) in 2006 and the update in December 2007 sent companies scrambling to get their electronically stored information litigation-ready; however, the truth of the matter is that many organizations are still spinning their wheels.

According to Diamond, less than 20 percent of organizations nationwide are litigation-ready and records-compliant. Furthermore, the stakes are high. Discovery accounts for about 50 percent of litigation costs today and is increasing. "Most discovery is around electronic documents and mostly e-mail," he says.

It's not unheard of that a discovery bill will cost a company two to three times the cost of improving its IT processes. And litigation is one instance where size doesn't matter. A smaller organization is just as likely to incur a litigation bill for millions of dollars as a larger organization.

"Even among smaller companies there's an enormous demand to archive messages."
-- Jerod Powell | CEO / Co-Founder 

Jerod Powell, co-founder and CEO of InfinIT Consulting, a San Jose, Calif.-based IT consulting firm and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, notes a recent escalation in customer interest in archiving solutions. "Even among smaller companies there's an enormous demand to archive messages," he says, as well as a growing trend to set policy around messaging.

That's good news, since the U.S. Sentencing Commission in January published its proposed amendment emphasizing document retention policies as part of an effective compliance program.

"In the last 12 months we're finding that companies at first acknowledge having one problem with e-mail, then they realize that they have several problems," says Shelia Childs, research director, storage technologies and strategies at Gartner Inc. The three most common e-mail pain points are e-discovery, storage, and mailbox capability.

Gartner expects the e-mail archive products market to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 21.2 percent, reaching $1.23 billion in 2013.

A Closer Look

By addressing archive, retention, and discovery in Microsoft Exchange 2010, Microsoft not only addresses e-discovery but the costs associated with bulging e-mailboxes and storage. The newest product version also enhances fault tolerance, speeds disaster recovery, and improves overall data security.

For starters, the Exchange 2010 infrastructure gives organizations storage hardware options with support for both traditional storage area networks (SANs) and lower cost direct-attached storage (DAS) or Serial ATA (SATA) and just a bunch of disks (JBOD). Exchange 2010 requires a fraction as much disk I/O as Exchange 2003 or 2007, which is why organizations can opt for commodity disk drives and still receive high performance.

InfinIT's Powell is all for it. "Why should companies have to buy a SAN if they don't need one?" he says.

At the same time, Microsoft makes it more affordable for companies to provide users with larger mailboxes, which is critical at a time when organizations live and die by e-mail.

Using the Personal Archive, users can drag PST files to a specialized mailbox that's associated with their primary mailbox. The Personal Archive appears alongside the primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook Web App for easy access. Administrators can apply the new automated retention policies in Exchange 2010 to allow users to either delete or archive e-mails, or to control when messages are automatically moved from a primary mailbox to the Personal Archive based on expiration dates.

Taking compliance to the next level, Microsoft provides a Legal Hold feature in Exchange 2010 that retains mailbox items, including e-mail, appointments, and tasks from both the primary mailbox and Personal Archive. A Web-based Multi-Mailbox Search feature in Exchange 2010 allows designated individuals to search large volumes of message types stored in mailboxes across one or more Exchange 2010 servers for legal discovery or investigative purposes.

What Exchange administrator won't appreciate the new easy-to-use and cost-saving Single Item Restore or Deleted Item Retention feature for backup and disaster recovery?

Gartner's Child notes that Microsoft paid attention to the look and flow of the new features in Exchange 2010, which speaks volumes to what organizations are asking for. "The user experience is critical when it comes to minimizing the impact of the solution and not disrupting the daily workflow," she says.

Archive, retention, and discovery are nothing without mailbox resiliency for data protection, security, and cost of ownership. Exchange 2010 is architected for high availability and fast failover. When deploying the latest version of Exchange organizations can opt for a simple two-server configuration with full redundancy, a capability that in the past required a minimum of four servers and a separate solution for databases.

Today, Database Availability Groups (DAGs) of up to 16 mailbox servers use continuous replication to update database copies, manage individual database failures, and provide automatic recovery from disk, server, and datacenter failure.

Powell is currently working on a beta Exchange 2010 EBS migration with a venture capital business customer that reached out to his organization specifically looking for the mobility, archive, and disaster recovery features.

"The customer will save money and realize improved resiliency and disaster recovery," says Powell.

With an Exchange 2010 online or premise deployment, Microsoft provides customers a more flexible, robust, and reliable messaging platform while reducing IT costs and improving administrative controls around compliance and management.
 

Colocation Facility Upgrade

This past weekend we completed a successful migration to our new colocation facility in Santa Clara, California.

We are excited to inform all our customers that we are now in a SAS 70 Type II compliant datacenter. Why is this important? This ensures that we have the most adequate controls and safeguards in place when it comes to hosting and processing data that belongs to our customers.

Each business is unique in their size, industry, requirements, growth goals, etc.  To our customers with 5 users, 50 users, 500 users and more, we strive every day to improve our service offerings so that you can take advantage of the latest technologies available to help your business grow. 

For our customers undergoing HIPAA or SOX compliance, we're now putting more measures in place for InfinIT to be your trusted IT partner. 

Top 5 Ways To Reduce IT Costs in 2010

#1: Managed IT Services
#2: Internal Staff vs. Outsourcing Evaluation
#3: Cloud Hosting Technologies
#4: Virtualization
#5: Backup & Disaster Recovery

The top question on everyone's mind starting the New Year is how to reduce their overall IT costs.  2009 was a tough year for many businesses.  Budgets were slashed, projects were put on hold, and companies had to evaluate what projects and technologies were crucial to keep their businesses afloat. Even those organizations that were thriving were keenly aware of their IT expenditures and looking for ways maximize their ROI.

With the economy slowly climbing out of our recession, we still have a long ways to go before budgets are back to where they used to be. Here's a helpful list of the top 5 ways you can help your organize control and reduce costs for 2010 while giving your employees the support they need to stay productive and keep your business running smoothly.

#1: Managed IT Services
If you use an outside firm to help you with your daily IT support needs, make sure that you can answer 'yes' to all of the following questions.  If you can't, it's time to re-evaluate your service contract and your IT firm. Look for a Managed IT Service Provider that can provide you the proactive maintenance, strategic planning and budget control that you need for 2010.

• Do you receive unlimited IT/network support for a flat monthly cost?
• Do you have a method for accurately predicting your IT expenditures as you grow for each employee that you add?
• Do you have you have the ability to get help 24x7 if you need it?
• Are you provided with device monitoring tools that can alert you about potential problems which could affect your systems/network (ie. virus, disk space usage, etc.)
• Do you have a formal SLA contract in-place that guarantees trouble-ticket response times?
• Are all of your systems up to date with the latest security patches and virus definitions?
• Do you have anti-virus protection software installed on each system in your network?
• Do you have clear and easy methods for contacting your IT support staff?
• Do you have a way of tracking all work that was done for your users and your network each day/week/month?
• Do you have a contact that reviews with you on a regular basis your IT goals, project plans and ongoing technology recommendations?

#2: Internal Staff vs. Outsourcing Evaluation
Depending on the size of your organization, it comes time to evaluate which IT strategy is the most beneficial and cost efficient: Should I hire an internal person/staff or outsource my IT needs?

What's the best choice? It depends.  For small businesses, it's usually always more cost efficient to hire an outside firm to support your IT needs.  The cost of an annual contract compared to the salary of a quality engineer is often an easy choice.  Many midsize and enterprise organizations have one person on staff who manages the daily operations of the business, including an outsourced IT staff.  While others understand that's it's difficult to staff an entire team to fill the gaps of your entire realm of IT needs - from helpdesk technicians up to CIO.

It's important for the business owner, head of finance, or head of operations to sit down with a trusted IT partner and evaluate the following:

• How many IT resources/personnel do I need to employ to fully support our organization?  
• Can I ensure that the employee/staff will be able to successfully manage all of our network needs?
• If I hire an employee/staff, will I still need to bring in high-level consultants for larger projects?
• Can the employee/staff handle all day-to-day issues that come up as well as provide the strategic planning/guidance to implement new technologies?
• Have I factored in the cost of bonuses, salary increases, hardware and employee training costs in my cost-benefit analysis?
• Is it important for me to have someone physically in the office every day to support my users?
• Do I have a resource for purchasing the right hardware at the best possible price?

#3: Cloud Hosting Technologies
Do you have one or multiple servers that you manage in-house?  Do they reside at your office location or do you pay for data center space?  Take a look at your central business technologies and evaluate whether it is more cost and time efficient to move them up to the cloud.  Make sure to do a full ROI comparison and a cost-benefit analysis to determine what's best for your organization in terms of budget, management time, and in-house expertise.

For example, an organization managing a full Windows infrastructure might be running Exchange Server, SharePoint, and an ERP system.  Take two huge pieces out of that puzzle and move your e-mail and document collaboration utilities up to the cloud.  Microsoft released their new Online Services which bundles Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications and Live Meeting all for only $10/user (and only $5/user if you're just dealing with Exchange).  You can take advantage of an immediate ROI by eliminating the costs of licensing, hardware, software, backup utilities, storage devices, data center space, an engineer to manage your environment, and more.  Just the peace of mind is enough that two of your most crucial business technologies are taken care of and backed by a fully secure, redundant, high-powered Microsoft infrastructure (all for pennies on the dollar of what you would have to spend to build a comparable environment).

#4: Virtualization
Thanks to some of the newest technology updates in 2009, organizations can take advantage of proven virtualization technologies that can reduce costs, save on excess hardware, and maximize performance.  Take a look at the following technologies that can surely help you move towards both an eco-friendly and cost efficient infrastructure:

• Compellent: Compellent delivers an industry-leading network storage solution by removing the limits of physical drives and aggregating them into logical virtual volumes. Their virtualization technologies significantly lower storage infrastructure costs, reduce energy expenditures and recover any size volume to any server in less than 10 seconds.
  
  
• Citrix Xen Server: Consolidate your servers and reduce your data center costs by deploying Citrix's powerful and proven server virtualization technologies.  By providing features like live migration, shared storage support, and centralized multi-server management, XenServer enables any organization, no matter the size or budget, to immediately benefit from the power of virtualization for server consolidation and business continuity.
  
  
• Microsoft Essential Business Server: For midsize organizations who have hit the limit of Small Business Server (SBS), take a look at Essential Business Server- an affordable yet powerful multi-server solution that supports up to 300 users.  EBS 2008 consolidates core infrastructure to three server roles, and also supports multiple virtualization options, helping to reduce your hardware footprint and lower power consumption to save time and money.

#5: Backup & Disaster Recovery
Have you ever sat down and analyzed how much it would cost your organization if you lost all of your data?  What if your laptop dies and you have no access to your crucial documents?  What if your server crashes and unexpectedly leaves you without any options of recovering your data?  What if you relied on manually swapping out server tapes every night, only to find out that you're only able to recover 25% of the data you thought was being backed up? 

Start evaluating solutions now, while everything is running smoothly, and get  the peace of mind that your data is protected in the case of a disaster. 

Look for a managed business disaster recovery solution that provides virtual restore capabilities so that you can keep working while you replace your hardware.