One of the common misconceptions of cloud based services in mid to large enterprises is that hosted service costs do not scale favourably when compared to an in-house solution. Traditionally a large scale roll out of a mission critical system such as email, meant heavy, front loading of capital expenditure in order to acquire hardware & software / licenses. Whilst this model may have suited mid to large enterprises in the past, smart businesses are looking at the option of the ‘cloud’, due to a ‘pay only for what you are using’ pricing model. A common objection though is the 3 to 5 year total cost of ownership of ‘in-house’ versus ‘cloud’ solutions. Often the in-house solution may appear to more cost effective however when the entire scope of ancillary service cost is taken into account, this may not be the case.
Take Fruit’s recent migration as a case in point. This is an organisation headquartered in London with around 10 main sites (UK wide). They have two technical support staff overseeing around 300 users, accessing a wide range of fixed and mobile computer hardware, plus countless software products. Their existing email infrastructure was Microsoft Exchange 2007, supported in-house, with servers spread over three of their larger sites for resilience and performance. This was installed around three and a half years ago – a migration from Exchange 2003. The in-house Exchange 2007 setup is also supplemented by 3rd party Spam and Virus filtering as well as hosted online archiving.
Following a recent IT review, some key strategy decisions were made:
- Steady increase in mail traffic and critically attachment sizes growing, meant that capacity issues needed addressed in the short term.
- Mail server platform upgrade to Exchange 2010 to take advantage of the latest features such as 25GB mailbox capacity. A cost effective way to upgrade, must be found.
- The in-house IT department struggle to provide service when site wide Exchange 2007 problems occurred. Support of the exchange environment should be outsourced to specialists.
- Email services are mission critical to the business and therefore should have a Service Level Agreement in place to provide maximum uptime, fully resilient and ensure business continuity in the event of disaster.
The solution selected was Fruit Mobile’s Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 platform. Not only did Fruit’s service satisfy the requirements set out, but fruit were also able to deliver an almost cost neutral switchover by consolidating the Spam and Virus filtering service as well and Online Archiving into a single platform. Fruit provided a fully project managed migration service and, in collaboration with the local IT staff, moved the entire email system to the cloud. Redundant in-house server hardware was reclaimed and is currently being redeployed for other projects. IT technicians can now focus on delivering excellent desktop support to the staff. The business is now protected by a 99.9% uptime SLA for email services, ensuring they keep going even when in-house problems strike.
Having previously dismissed the Cloud as being too expensive, this is one “too big” enterprise client enjoying all the benefits for what they were paying for stand-alone services.
Still think you are too big?
