Introduction
Ask any executive, manager or employee which applica-tion is most critical to the funcapplica-tioning of their business and there’s a very good chance they will say “our email system”. Rightly or wrongly, email has become the glue that holds communications together in most companies. Whether it’s formal corporate communications; messages that drive critical workflows; emails carrying attachments; scheduling messages to set up meetings; critical project updates or the endless torrent of updates, news, views, etc., email has become an indispensible tool for every company.
But, like most tools that we depend on, individuals, compa-nies and IT departments have a love-hate relationship with their email system. Until recently, for most companies there was very little choice in their email systems – Microsoft Exchange was (and still is) the de facto standard in the corporate world. However, with the advent of Cloud comput-
ing, there are now several choices and the marketing of the Cloud email vendors has played on the love-hate relation-ship of Microsoft users with their email system as much as it has stressed the lower acquisition cost and total cost of ownership claimed by the Cloud vendors.
But is this really the case? Is the choice for companies that need a robust, scalable and secure email system simply a choice between the known problems of their existing Exchange system or the promise and unknowns of the Cloud? Or is there a solution that may deliver the best of both worlds?
This Coyote Creek Business Brief discusses the issues of on-premise, Cloud and managed email systems. It also provides a cost comparison tool and decision making framework to help you make the most informed decision about which option is best for your company.
Are Frustrations with Microsoft
Exchange Driving You to The Cloud?
“ As a leading venture capital firm, Benchmark operates in a fast-paced environment. Timely
communication is critical so we cannot afford to have our email down. Coyote Creek’s
RMM service delivers 24 x 7 x 365 reliability and gives us total confidence in our Exchange
environment so we can focus on our investments.”
The Business Challenge
In a recent Coyote Creek webinar, Executive Administrators voted lost productivity due to unreliable email and calendaring one of their major challenges. Lost productivity takes many forms such as:
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Not only does resolving these problems have a hard cost to the business, they also carry other soft costs and other negative impacts. First, the business cannot run efficiently, resulting in missed deadlines and people having to play “catch up” in their own time. Second, it leads to frustra-tion and to executive users having a poor percepfrustra-tion of the people, processes and performance of their IT department. As challenging or outright unfair as this might be on your over-worked and under-resourced IT team, this is the reality in many companies.
The IT Challenge
Email is a politically charged IT issue and problems with email and calendaring - whether it is the entire system being down or an intermittent, hard to trace problem — as-sume a disproportionate importance in most users’ percep-tions of IT’s performance.
While IT managers acknowledge and understand these is-sues, in an environment of reduced IT budgets and pressure to make those costs that can’t be reduced at least predictable, managing an email system presents a series of unique and formidable challenges to IT. For example, the reality of most email systems is that, allowing for planned down-time, they achieve close to 99.99% reliability, so how much additional support and technical resources can IT dedicate to solving the “last-mile” reliability issues and providing round-the-clock user support when they have so many other priorities? Additionally, because email is such an accessible and therefore vulnerable application, it is critical that IT stay up-to-date with the latest releases, not just the major new versions but also the myriad security patches that must be applied to ensure systems integrity and reliability.
Over the last few years this problem has become even more critical and complex because email is being accessed not just from within a secured environment but also from an ever-growing list of smart phones, tablet computers and unsecured home computers.
Although there are best practices that will address many of these issues (for example, see our blogs on “White List” devices at http://coyotecrk.wordpress.com for more details), there is no getting around the fact that release, patch and device management is a major operational issue for any large-scale email installation that carries significant direct costs (e.g. for test and staging hardware) as well as labor costs. In fact, a rule of thumb that we have developed over the years, is that it takes one full-time person (or their cost-equivalent) to patch and manage a 100 servers
Various consulting firms have attempted to put a value on the cost of these issues. This is a challenging task since costs range from the hard cost of lost adminis-trative and IT time to the soft or opportunity cost of executives missing key internal or external meetings.
whether they are doing so on a manual basis or using a system management tool for this task.
Is The Cloud a Solution?
Cloud email vendors have been quick to publish easily understood cost calcula-tors that show their price advantage versus a Micro-soft Exchange on-premise solution. A widely quoted study by TechRepublic.com claimed comparative costs per 100 users to be $13,200 for a Microsoft on-premise solution versus $5,000 for a Cloud-based Google Apps Premium service. In the face of this price pressure, Microsoft has launched their Cloud-based Exchange service at a price point intended to be competitive with Google.
However tempting the Cloud solution may appear to be, there are many issues that must be seriously considered when a company contemplates such as move, these include: ǩ Reliability – although the Cloud infrastructure is becoming
more stable all the time, recent Google Mail and Amazon outages have reminded us that the Cloud is not bullet-proof and that outages will still occur and must be planned for. ǩ Business Continuity – all companies should have a
back-up or business continuity strategy in place which could mean parallel infrastructures, multiple Cloud service providers or even a “Cloud to Ground” solution where the data is shared and synced between Cloud and on-premise systems.
ǩ Disaster Recovery – similarly, all companies should have a disaster recovery plan because, like it or not, data centers are susceptible to both manmade and natural disasters. ǩ Migration – most companies of any size have terabytes
of email data and archives, user profiles, calendars, etc. Thought must be given to how this data will be migrated to a Cloud-based system to ensure business continuity
and traceability of information.
ǩ User Knowledge – love it or hate it, most users have a competency and comfort level with Microsoft Outlook that minimizes the training and support burden on IT. When considering a Cloud-based option, companies must ensure that pilots, training, roll-out and support processes are in place regardless of whether the email client is Outlook or a new system.
ǩ Functionality – Microsoft Outlook is more than an email environment both in terms of its original design and the way that people use it. Companies must be careful to en-sure they understand the way in which their employees use the system for collaboration, folder sharing, archiving, etc. and that a prospective Cloud-based solution can meet these requirements.
ǩ Integration – many companies integrate their email system with other systems, for example, as part of their workflow and approvals processes. These companies must ensure that the same integration capabilities exist in the Cloud-based system and factor in development, testing, and maintenance costs to support this integration. ǩ Compliance and Data Protection – companies must
ensure that, especially for global deployments, they understand the impact of local compliance, privacy and data protection regulations. For example, within the EU, any personal information stored about an individual must be physically located within the EU.
While the costs of addressing these issues will vary from company to company, all of these issues must be consid-ered as they carry costs and risks that could negate the apparent cost advantage of the Cloud.
On-Premise Bad; Cloud Good?
This is a problem that Coyote Creek has been tackling with business users and IT departments for over 10 years. In that time, we have worked for and partnered with IT teams focused on providing a reliable and scalable internal email solution. Through this experience, we have learned how complex it can be to operate Microsoft Exchange but also that moving an enterprise to a Cloud-based email solution involves levels of risk, complexity and cost that few business or IT executives fully anticipate.
We also realized that with our highly skilled application engineering teams (all based in the US) and the best-prac-tice processes we have developed over the years, we could architect a repeatable solution at a predictable monthly cost for Microsoft Exchange customers.
RMM – The Best of Both Worlds
Our experience has taught us that there are three key is-sues that have to be taken into account when assessing email solution options — people, processes and product. Too often, vendors with large marketing budgets focus the discussion entirely on product issues but the reality is that people and process issues have significantly more bearing on the success of an email installation than the product on which it is based. That’s why we developed Coyote Creek’s Remote Monitoring and Management service (RMM). RMM blends on-premise and remote technologies to pro-vide a “best of both worlds” solution to the central issue of
delivering the most available and reliable email service at a predictable, affordable cost.
RMM is a service-based solution that starts out with a discovery process designed to uncover what your organi-zation needs from its email infrastructure. For example, what levels of uptime and availability are required; does the system need to be architected to support rapid growth or is cost predictability and containment the major issue?
Once we understand your goals, we work with your IT team to audit and document your Microsoft Exchange infrastruc-ture and update it. Then in line with our best practices we “harden” your infrastructure to ensure the highest possible availability and reliability. Once this has been done, we take over the day-to-day monitoring and management of the Exchange environment using remote tools and technolo-gies run out of our Network Operations Center. With this in place, we handle antivirus status, backups, capacity
plan-“Coyote Creek’s RMM service delivers a lot
of value. Knowing that the system is being
watched 24x7 and maintenance is handled
pro-actively gives me tremendous
confi-dence. And I really appreciate having data at
my fingertips.”
— Greg Ogle, IT Director, Equinix
Threshold-based monitoring alarms are triggered in our 24 x 7 NOC anytime one of these thresholds are exceeded.
ning, device and patching support, etc. giving clients peace of mind of knowing that Coyote Creek’s experts are working 24x7 to ensure the terms of your Service Level Agreement (SLA) are met.
That’s where our expertise and process around these issues benefits our customers. Unlike internal IT people who may go through an Exchange update cycle once every two or three years and apply patches only when something breaks, Coyote Creek’s team lives, eats and sleeps Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. We have developed best practices for all aspects of monitoring, management and support of these applications and we provide pro-active services to keep you ahead of the game and ahead of problems. RMM enables your company to achieve a best of both worlds email solution that provides business users with the reliability, availability and, when needed, support that they require along with the following IT benefits:
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Summary
Email is one of — and maybe the only — truly mission criti-cal application for most businesses. As the on-premise vs. Cloud-based email debate intensifies, it is important that both business users and IT understand the complexi-ties, risks and costs of migrating from a known Microsoft Exchange environment to a Cloud-based system.
Coyote Creek’s experience is that many of the problems us-ers report with their Microsoft Exchange server and Outlook email and scheduling environment can be relatively easy to fix. Coyote Creek’s RMM system provides a best of both worlds’ solution that stabilizes and optimizes your internal Exchange environment and then provides remote 24x7 mon-itoring, management and support of that environment using the best-practices that we have developed while working with some of the world’s most demanding companies.
About Coyote Creek
Appendix A: Coyote Creek Decision Making Considerations
1. Costs – based on your answers to the following questions, you should be able to complete this table and make a rough cost comparison between these three options.
2. SLAs – Reliability and Performance a. What are your reliability goals?
b. What are your performance (response time) goals? c. What SLAs are in place to guarantee these goals? d. Are the SLAs enforceable?
Issue On-Premise Cloud RMM
Cost x number of static mailboxes Cost x number of remote mailboxes
Cost for additional storage per mailbox
Cost x number of white-list/non-standard mobile device or email client
Costs for mail server hardware for test, staging, production environments
Software license costs Monitoring and management software costs
Monitoring and management labor costs
Training costs – users Training costs – IT Support costs Upgrade costs Data migration costs Integration costs
3. Disaster Recovery
a. In the event of a disaster or catastrophic failure at your data center or the data center of your Cloud provider, what are your recovery plans?
b. What risks and costs are associated with these plans? 4. Business Continuity
a. How will you continue to support email based business operations in the event of an outage with your Cloud provider? b. What risks and costs are associated with this plan?
5. Migration
a. How many users and how much data has to be migrated? b. What is your Cloud migration strategy?
c. Have you quantified the efforts and identified resources for this project? d. What is your contingency plan if the migration plan hits a problem? 6. Integration
a. What systems are integrated to your mail system?
b. Do similar integration capabilities exist from your Cloud vendor?
c. If yes, what migration and testing needs to be done to prove this capability? d. What is the timing and cost of this work?
e. If no, what development would be necessary to integrate these systems? f. What would be the ongoing maintenance costs to support this integration? 7. User Training and Support
a. What is your plan for piloting the proposed system, winning user buy-in, training, roll-out and support to ensure user adoption?
b. How will you provide this training and what costs are associated with this? 8. Functionality
a. Have you audited the way in which employees use Microsoft Outlook and ensured that equivalent functionality is available in the proposed system?
b. Have you involved power-users in reviewing options and got their input on functionality and user-training issues?
9. Compliance and Data Protection
a. Have you researched local compliance, privacy and data protection regulations in all the territories in which you plan to operate the proposed system?
Appendix B: Coyote Creek RMM Options
Issue Monitor Maintain Manage
7x24 hour monitoring & alerting X X X
Event ticket generation X X X
Server health report X X X
Monitor backup status X X X
Microsoft baseline security analysis X X X
Automated service reports X X X
Antivirus Definition Status X X X
Hardware Asset inventory N/A X X
Windows Patch management N/A X X
Customer Portal (incl. Ticket Management) N/A X X
Level 1 Support T&M X X
Level 2 Support T&M T&M X
Microsoft License compliance report N/A N/A X
Software asset inventory report N/A N/A X
Remote Software Deployment N/A N/A X
Capacity Planning N/A N/A X
Application Support(Exchange) N/A N/A X
