For those of you who haven’t read Facebook’s S1- the notice that they’re going to become a publicly traded company – there was an incredibly important couple of paragraphs about how they deliver the service to their 800+ million active users and nearly $4 billion in revenue. They called it the “Hacker Way.”

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or who are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations, rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that, at any given time, can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to constantly keep shipping.

And to some, it might seem shocking  for us – a highly available, security focused SaaS company – to compare ourselves to a consumer service like Facebook.  But what all the companies that deliver internet services to customers at scale have realised is: if you don’t ship and continuously improve, you could fail.

Our CTO, Neil Murray, talked about this very problem with the BBC recently:

 “We’re an email company, but our technological problem isn’t email, really. It’s the production of technology.

Traditionally, the way people have built software has been fairly linear. You design it, you build it, you ship it.

But in the cloud space, and certainly in the email space, the evolution of the code is so rapid that our biggest problem is getting new features out in days, not weeks or months or years.”

And that’s where Facebook comes in. We have to continuously ship, or deliver, our software which creates our service – methodology called Continuous Delivery.

Much like the Agile practices of previous years, it is a process that is done well by some, to extremes by a few and misunderstood by many. I mean, if you ship something early and often, couldn’t there be bugs or mistakes in there?

First, came the Mimecast assessment day. Then, came Judgement Day. Nine brave Mimecasters sweated blood and tears in training, and then sweated some more waiting for the results of the vote.

But then the waiting was over, and nine became three as you sorted the wheat from the chaff with your votes.

The Mimecast fighter shortlist, in no particular order, was announced as:

These are the names that could strike fear into the hearts of other fighters daring to enter the fight night looking to come out unscathed. But who will be ‘the one’ to represent Mimecast on the night?

Following the results of the vote, your Mimecast Musketeers travelled to the other side of the capital to attend the CRN Assessment evening to determine who would be the chosen one. With that embedded in their minds, the Mimecast warriors donned their vests and boxing gloves one more time. The only difference this time was that they were sussing out the competition from other vendors, resellers and distributors, while trying to impress the Fight Night representatives who could eventually choose them and their….gulp….opponent.

With the dilemma of whether to play down their ability or not, the fearless trio set about a punch bag deciding to give it everything they had. Hundreds of press ups and sit ups later, the Mimecast hopefuls were wondering if they’d made the right decision to compete after all!

So, what about the competition?

“A mixed bag” was the answer from the CRN Fight Night Representative. “The Mimecast lads were definitely on the better side of things”. Even Trevor

I came to the same conclusion; whoever the ’chosen one’ is matched up against, it will inevitably be a brilliant fight. Both males and females looked very tough with one girl even representing Britain, which made certain legs quiver: “She could definitely knock me out” whimpered Rich “Scrappy Doo” Dean.

So there you have it; stage 2 of a lactic filled journey is complete. All we can do now is wait for CRN to announce the Mimecast fighter……. and that is when the hard work really begins!

Most innovations and disruptive technologies tend to bring out what I refer to as the flat-Earthers – individuals who wait for the tipping point of a new technology or idea to be well past proven before getting on board, or as Geoffrey Moore calls them in ‘Crossing the Chasm‘ – “Laggards!” Why is this? It’s because as humans we’re very dependent on habit forming behavior and love to hark back to a “better time” – and ”they don’t make them like that anymore” thinking. Adapting to change takes time, and I believe that Cloud Computing is at last winning over some of the last and most ardent deniers. But there may still be one last fallacy to overcome, which is cloud vendor lock-in. Nothing is quite as open and flexible as an old on-prem solution – or is it?

When mainstream Cloud Computing appeared (setting aside the whole mainframe, client/server, cloud discussion for a moment), there was much worry about how secure and ‘safe’ this new Cloud environment would be. Security was the cloud-deniers main argument for staying firmly entrenched in their onsite infrastructures. Now most agree that the Cloud generally offers a greater degree of security and resilience than would be possible on site, unless you have a DoD sized budget. Unfortunately there are still those who would have you believe the Cloud means you’re locked into a cloud-vendor, until death you do part.

I believe that this Cloud vendor lock-in fallacy is being touted by those who have a vested interest and would rather you kept your data onsite and within your own data center. There are many reasons cited by these flat-Earthers. Let me try to dispel their most common arguments.

Cost of migrating off Cloud platforms

One of the two most common problems cited is the cost of migrating away from Cloud platforms when the customer chooses to leave or the Cloud vendor implodes (implosion, another symptom of this Cloud computing sickness apparently). The argument usually goes like this; companies sit down to work out their ROI on a Cloud investment and get excited to see the Cloud demonstrably saves them money. However in their excitement the IT team neglects to factor in the cost of migrating OFF a cloud platform at some time in the future. This cost will come as a surprise when the inevitable Cloud Rapture finally arrives.

Complex deployments of information-worker software always seem to need someone to migrate data during an upgrade or swap out. I would argue that the cost of migrating from one on-premise solution to another is likely to be dramatically more expensive than a Cloud solution, simply because the Cloud vendor is:

• expecting to absorb or ingest your data at some point, and
• already planned on giving your that data back at the termination of your contract.

No customer should sign a Cloud vendor’s contract without that clause, and no Cloud vendor should expect them to. On premise solutions hide all sorts of complexity that makes it very hard for you to leave that solution. The cost of finally moving to any new platform means you’ve created your own on-premises vendor lock in.

Cloud Standards or Lack Thereof

The second of the two loose threads regularly pulled in this discussion: Industry standardization within the Cloud market is still a ways off. But this is not for want of trying. To address this, organizations like Open Stack counter the problems caused by a lack of Cloud standardization and drive the concept in the right direction.

Some believe Cloud vendors operate in a Wild West-like corner of the Internet where anyone with a domain name and an AWS account can set themselves up and attempt to lock you into their systems for years to come, by simply keeping their platform as proprietary as possible. This simply isn’t the case – Cloud vendors are in most cases quite reputable and treat your data as sacrosanct. There is already a lot of support for standards within the cloud market and many vendors are building standards-support into their environments without the need for regulation. Openness and transparency are inherently easier for a Cloud vendor to achieve given the availability of metadata within their environments. Try delivering openness and transparency in a network of closed systems and platforms.

The Highly Customized Nature of On-Premises Applications

Customers using big CRM and ERP applications are a breeding ground for custom modules and plugins for those monolithic applications; it’s the only way they get the functionality they want. For the time being it’s also the primary way the CRM and ERP vendors hold onto their customers, but the groundswell behind Cloud platforms like Salesforce mean this won’t last forever.

This corner of the discussion is quite closely tied to the cost of migrating a platform to or from a Cloud vendor too. On-premise applications that have undergone extensive deployments across massive WAN enabled infrastructures, and then have had to be tweaked with endless customizations, are going to be almost impossible to migrate to any other platform, Cloud or not. Declaring system bankruptcy and starting from scratch is often their only way out.

An example that demonstrates this well, might be moving a DB2 system to Oracle over the weekend.

Proprietary Formats and Data Types

Proprietary system formats and storage data types are possibly the earliest form of smoke and mirrors used by on-premise software vendors to lock their customers into on-premise solutions; odd that many of those on-premise vendors have since launched or supported some sort of cloud-washed version of their own platform.

Luckily the truth slowly prevailed as openness and transparency became the chosen path for reputable Cloud vendors, who in a bid to make their platforms more attractive and capable than their on-premise competition built in the functions require to search, export, extract and generally make your data available when you want it.

The Final Fallacy?

Quite simply, I believe the last great fallacy touted about Cloud computing is that of cloud vendor lock-in. Cloud is innovative and is becoming quite disruptive – businesses are turning to the Cloud to help solve complex problems which only a few years ago would have required a huge on-premise infrastructure.

We won’t have to wait long for this fallacy to die away. As more and more enterprises consider the Cloud first over on-premise solutions, the ruthless due diligence of the end users, administrators and the rest of the IT community will filter out these last remaining pieces of flat earth rhetoric.

Photo CC via ||read|| on Flickr

Last December, the Information Commissioners Office offered new guidance for information held in private email accounts concerning official business is subject to Freedom of Information requests.  So Public Officials, watch out!  You can’t use private emails to talk about official business without being discovered.

But this news didn’t surprise us considering the Generation Gmail research we conducted last year. The prevailing behaviour was shown in our research: 79% of people had used their personal email for work purposes. Since companies have no control over personal email this can lead to a complete compliance nightmare.

For most of us not in public service, however, this brings up the much broader question: should organisations encourage the use of work email for personal use, or tolerate personal email for business use?

We live in a rapidly changing landscape, the IT world has significantly transformed over the last 12 months with the consumerisation of IT, Social Networks, Mobile and Cloud. It’s clearly not business as usual anymore.

Generation Gmail discovered that people felt their corporate email wasn’t up to the job.  With limits of mailbox sizes, remote and mobile access sometimes lacking, they felt forced to use personal devices and accounts in order to remain productive.

This isn’t surprising with 33% on Exchange 2003 and 53% on Exchange 2007. 

At the same time, we’ve seen the rise of Smartphones, so people are used to being always ‘on.’  I would go so far as to say they want to be available all the time. I for one, hate turning my ‘out of office’ on and almost never do it.

Once individuals are used to switching between email accounts, it is almost inevitable that corporate policies will fall by the wayside.  But perhaps rather than trying to control employee behavior through policy, organisations should instead be focusing on ensuring they have the right technology in place to ensure that the *right* and the *easiest* employee behaviour become the same thing?

IT organisations need to provide an email system that’s equivalent in features and functionality to employees’ personal email in order for them to choose by default it. So they can get the compliance and security benefits of corporate email.

And to empower that, employers need to be OK with employees using their work email for personal communication – employees shouldn’t need to make a decision about which account to use.

The benefits beyond compliance are interesting too.  Having employees looking at emails out of hours and when they’re on the move empowers lots more productivity. Compared to the potential loss during work time for high value workers, creating a more responsive, agile organisation.

At least for US politicians this is already enshrined in law, as Sarah Palin found out when her personal account was hacked.  But it’s also not much good if it’s allowed to be deleted…

If I were an IT manager or CIO, I would rather have most high value information workers were comfortable sending a personal email from a work account than visa-versa.

It’s time the business enabled the IT manager to be on a system that fulfils the demands of the users by eliminating the complexity that stops them migrating and upgrading.

Photo CC via CA Technologies on Flickr

The debate was extremely space-limited, and as I edited down my remarks I found that I had reduced a very important point to a single passing reference: “Being open to physically handicapped or geographically isolated workers can improve the prospects for finding a highly qualified candidate.”

This comment only scratches the surface of the importance of Internet technology in empowering the handicapped to play a more full role in our society and our economy. Had I more space, I would have mentioned not just the benefit to the employer of being able to employ skilled but handicapped workers, and not just the obvious benefit to the handicapped themselves of being able to find more meaningful and satisfying work. I would have mentioned the benefit to all of us that comes from getting to know some amazing people who are otherwise invisible to us because of their handicaps.

Most of all, I would have mentioned John Ferguson.

In 1994, I was the co-founder of a company called First Virtual, a pioneering Internet payment system. During our salad days, our service was growing so fast that I calculated that, if it continued, everyone on the planet would be our customer in 16 months. Obviously that didn’t happen, but the growth posed a customer service challenge that we met well enough to get accolades from our customers. Much of the credit for that goes to John Ferguson.

We hired John as our first customer service representative, and he developed most of the templates, processes, texts, and procedures that served us well as we grew. Customers often told me how helpful and efficient he was, and how happy they were with him. But there was something about John that none of them even imagined.

John was a quadriplegic. Confined to a wheelchair, at best, for virtually his whole life, he did all his typing with his mouth. I’m not sure anyone has ever felt as liberated by his job as John did — even Stephen Hawking was 21 before he was first afflicted, but John had been fighting his disease since early childhood, and he’d had few chances to put his talents to productive use.

First Virtual gave him a chance to be truly useful and appreciated, and he thrived in that role, and in not being seen primarily as a handicapped person. In fact, even one of my friends and colleagues who worked with John very closely had absolutely no idea of his handicap for the first year or so they worked together. Internet technology didn’t just allow John to work from home; it allowed him to be as close as he could ever get to a “normal” — non-handicapped — person. He never wanted pity, and he clearly delighted in having his disability be, at least in this one context, utterly invisible to the world.

I believe that working with John enriched the lives of all of us who knew him at First Virtual. It was impossible to come to know him and not become more sensitive to the situation of the disabled, more aware not only of their difficulties but of their potential and their dignity. Handicap or no, John was simply a great customer service agent, and it made a big difference when you learned that fact before you learned anything of his handicap. Working with John changed me forever, making me aware that even sympathy and pity can be a form of discrimination.

Several years into his time at First Virtual, John died rather suddenly. I don’t think he expected a long life, and he certainly knew how limited the time he had would be, but he was determined to make as much as he possibly could of the life that was given him. I will always remember him as an inspiring example of how determination and technology can overcome even the most extreme handicap. And I will always be glad that we at First Virtual were daring enough to hire someone who worked from home not by choice, but out of necessity.

So that’s another argument for having people work from home, one that I couldn’t possibly do justice to in the space available in Business Week. If you go down the path of hiring remote employees, and you’re very lucky, you might meet someone like John Ferguson, and he might just change you for life.

Drum roll……“The challenge has been set.  Nine brave Mimecasters volunteered, but only one gets the call. Two hours of relentless training and possible humiliation stand in their way. The prize? The chance to represent Mimecast at the Channel ‘Event of the Year.’”

From this dramatic intro, you could be forgiven for assuming that you were watching a trailer for the latest Jason Statham movie, but no. Jack ‘won’t be beaten’ Blackmore ruined that image by donning a ‘Next for Men’ t-shirt, complimented perfectly by a pair of Steve McKenzie’s surfer shorts.

Unfortunately only five of the original nine warriors showed up to the first hurdle: the training session. Greg “The Wizard” Collins was suffering from a 25 day sickness bug, while Jason “People’s Champ” Kennett, Nick “The Southern Dandy” Moss and Trev “The Hitman” Highley were unable to attend due to unforeseen circumstances.  But fear not, they are looking to come back strong at the next session.

One by one, the brave warriors strolled into a tension-filled gym.  Expectation was low but morale was sky high. Will ‘’I AM’’ Lowden confirms his brawn-over-brain reputation by struggling to remove his mouth guard from the hot water. Not a great start!

Technical ability training was the first order of the day. Gary, a personal trainer at Urban Kings, was the man entrusted to put these Mimecasters through their paces. With hand wraps securely fastened and dignity still in place, they began unleashing their finest jabs, mixed with a few ducks and bounces.  Jason ’Reggie’’ Miller looked unsure of his lefts and rights but Richard ‘’Scrappy Doo’’ Dean brought a chill to the air with his earth shattering jabs.  At the end of the technical session, Gary’s conclusion was that: “David (The Doctor) has a great left hook, and his concentration is second to none.”

With the gym starting to empty due to the post-apocalyptic odour, the Chris Eubank wannabees moved onto their final challenge:  fitness. John, a fitness coach at Urban Kings, unleashed a relentless routine of squats and lifts with a 15kg weight. This was all that stood between the fighters and the first interlude of this epic journey.  After 10 minutes, Jason ‘‘Reggie’’ Miller bowed out while the others fought on, determined not to let anyone have the psychological edge.

By now, thoroughly exhausted, the boys ended with some one-on-one practice with Will ‘’I AM’’ Lowden and Jack ‘’won’t be beaten’’ Blackmore doing more burping than punching. Amidst the screams of “Harder! Harder!” they were trying to slog the hell out of each other while at the same time noticing they had made a smiley face on the canvas with their sweat. Nice.

Urban Kings experts, Gary and John, were pleased with the overall performances and had this to say for the Mimecast heroes: “All of them have a good level of fitness but in terms of having the mental attitude and discipline to train and fight; Dave [The Doctor] has the edge.”

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, there you have it. Experts and Bookmakers say Dave “The Doctor” Rodger…

…but on a warm evening in May, who do the people want to see dance under those bright lights? It is not too late to vote – visit: http://info.mimecast.com/FightNight_vote before 5th February 2012.

Vint centers his argument on the claim that “technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself.” This is patently incorrect. Among the most widely recognized human rights are clothing and shelter, which are among the most fundamental of human technologies. It is true that some rights are more abstract, but many are not. The US Bill of RIghts guarantees freedom of the press and the right to bear arms; technology is fundamental to both of those rights.

The UN Declaration of Human Rights goes further, in Article 19, asserting a fundmental human right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” It is no great stretch to say that Article 19 itself makes Internet access a basic human right. Article 27 declares a right “to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” Does anyone really believe this is possible, in the modern world, without access to the Internet?

More broadly, it is increasingly impossible to participate fully in the political life of a developed nation without Internet access. All rights related to such participation will, in the future, be meaningless without a right to access. In his modesty, perhaps, Vint fails to recognize the extent to which the Internet is transforming almost every aspect of society, certainly including the political and cultural spheres in which many of our hitherto-guaranteed rights will become meaningless without Internet access.

It might be argued that this just means that Internet access is necessary for, and implied by, some of our existing rights. The truth of that statement, however, in no way negates the fundmental importance of Internet access. The right to participate fully in society also implies a right to food and shelter, but that doesn’t mean we don’t view those things as basic rights themselves.

What’s hardest for us old Internet hands to accept is that the Internet hasn’t just been a success; it is changing the very nature of what it means to be human. Recent studies have already shown that the availability of the Internet changes the way we use our own memories — that is, it alters the very fabric of our thought, let alone our discussion and debate. Increasingly it will be impossible — and already is in many countries — to be a full participant in civil society without Internet access. If Internet access is a prerequisite to full participation in citizenship, it should certainly be viewed as a human right.

Vint, the Internet is more important than even you think!

So while we are waiting, here’s a quick look at the versions that have come before:

The Younger Half-Cousin Done Good – Exchange 1.0

Actually not a server product at all, Exchange 1.0 or Windows Messaging to give it its real name was an email client included in Windows 95, 98 and NT4. The fashion at the time, 1996, was to lack support for Internet email so if you were looking for SMTP or POP3 support you were out of luck unless you installed the separate Microsoft Plus! pack, codename ‘Frosting’. Frosting included other delights such as Space Cadet Pinball, DriveSpace 3 and some space-age screensaver and wallpaper files.

Windows Messaging had us hooked though; we never looked back. In 1996 HTML messages were evil, our marketing departments hadn’t yet realized how to brand plan text emails yet. It was de rigueur to include an obscure quote in your footer, and if you were really out to impress, a string of special characters on the verge of ASCII art. There was no support for international characters either; sorry, the rest of the world you lose.

The First Server, Server Product – Exchange 4.0

The server side of the business came crashing through the door one day wanting in on the new funky Windows Messaging action. Exchange Server 4.0 was born as an upgrade to Microsoft Mail 3.5, which in 1991 was slowly turning into something called Network Courier in. Lotus were very excited about acquiring cc:Mail at about the same time, so the race was on.

Our CEO, Peter Bauer still proudly displays his Microsoft Mail 3.5 certifications on the office wall.

Exchange Server 4.0 was a wholly new system, designed on the X400 client-server model, supported by a single database and an X500 directory service, which later morphed into Active Directory.

1997 Microsoft Valued at $261 Billion and Exchange Server 5.0

In the year Microsoft becomes the World’s most valuable company, and Bill Clinton is returned to office for a second term, as is Steve Jobs; Microsoft release Exchange 5.0 and the new Exchange Administrator Console.

Adding the new Internet Mail Connector allowed your new shiny Exchange 5.0 server to communicate over the internet via SMTP, for the first time allowing your users to arrange their days around the send/receive button. Exchange 5.0 also introduced a new-fangled web-based email interface uninspiringly called, Exchange Web Access.

A Few Short Months Later – Exchange Server 5.5

In November 1997 while the tech world was distracted by the $37 Billion merger of WorldCom and MCI Communications, Microsoft snuck out Exchange 5.5, which was sold in two editions, Standard and Enterprise. Standard was limited to a 16GB database which was a throwback to previous versions, whereas Enterprise Edition had a database limit of 16TB. I remember building a business case for Enterprise Edition and having to explain to the business why 16GB wasn’t enough – if only we knew then what we know now.

Drum Roll Please, Ladies and Gentlemen Exchange 2000 Server

By November 2000 we’re on Exchange Server version 6.0, codename Platinum. A big leap forward with changes to support clustering and database size limitations. But, the upgrade required there to be a complete Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure on the network as there was no built-in directory. There was no in-place upgrade from previous versions of Exchange, so consultants and Microsoft Partners made merry with the consulting hours as customers required both platforms to be online at once.

Codename Titanium – Exchange Server 2003

Version 6.5 added some useful migration tools that helped companies consolidate their distributed Exchange environments; I have a true story that demonstrates this perfectly.  One client of mine, who had twenty different Exchange Servers, one for each letter of the alphabet, distributed users depending on their surname, doubling up for some of the less common letters like X, Y & Z. All twenty servers, none of which were virtualized, sat in the same datacenter in central London. How they got to this stage was a long story, but the realization that Exchange Server 2003 could help them resolve this problem saw twenty servers whittled down to a handful of streamlined clusters in four locations across the globe.

Bells and Whistles and a Big Fanfare – Exchange Server 2007

Exchange Server 2007 was released amid much fanfare and marketing by Microsoft, and rightly too, this version brought some wonderful new technologies and functionality. Sadly though some users chose not to upgrade and stayed languishing on Exchange Server 2000 and 2003, I even knew a few still on 5.5!

64 bit support was a bit of a struggle for some customers, but eventually gave every IT department the budget to upgrade their old Exchange Server to a new, faster one. The 2007 release was version 8, codename E12 and brought and Enterprise Edition which allowed a whopping 16TB maximum database size.

HA Database Clustering was given a whole new batch of TLAs;, SCC, LCR, SCR and CCR. The Exchange Management Shell arrived as did Unified Messaging and Outlook Anywhere (which was really called RPC over HTTP).

However Microsoft announced the death of Public folders in the next release, due to what they call a ‘Wild West’ of public folders.

Which Brings us Right up to Today – Exchange Server 2010

November 2009: Exchange Server 2010, or Exchange 14 to those in the know, hit the market brimming with cool new features. Database Availability Groups or DAGs became even more popular than ever before replacing the Clustering options from Exchange Server 2007. Server Roles became important to Exchange Architects everywhere and sparked much debate about where in the network to put the CAS.

Luckily large mailbox support was extended after its initial introduction to Exchange Server 2007, which was good news for most as their end users had been using disk space like there was no tomorrow and databases everywhere were getting rather full. To this day I know an end user who refuses to ‘clean out’ their 32GB mailbox on the basis that he “needs” all of that email and knows “exactly where it all is” – you know who you are sir, if you’re reading this.

Public Folders are included in 2010 and not deprecated as planned.

Unfortunately some businesses are still languishing on old versions like Exchange Server 2000 and 2003. You also know who you are, and you know how keen we are to get you to Exchange Server 2010.

Enter the Cloud – Office 365

Luckily for administrators dealing with “Mr. I’ve got a Huge Mailbox & I don’t Care” the Cloud started to make life easier, by offloading some of those Big Data and Email Management issues. Microsoft have just launched Office 365 and introduced Exchange Online. Although EO has been around since about 2005 and mainstream since 2008, it’s only now that users are beginning to see the real benefits of the Cloud.

Enter Exchange 15

What Exchange 15 or Exchange Server 2013 will bring is still shrouded in Mystery, even the Servers real name is unknown (I hoping for “Philip”) but it’s just round the corner and slowly information is trickling out of Redmond.

Personally, I can’t wait.

Enough said. Because email isn’t going away in a hurry

Wishing you a Happy New Year!

Like Christmas, it feels like new versions of core server software come round far too quickly, especially such valuable services like Microsoft Exchange. We’ve previously mentioned the lengthy procurement cycles that keep such services a constant version behind before, which generated some good feedback and discussion; many Exchange admins told me those delays adversely impact their own deployment plans, which is intensely frustrating for them and often forces their migration project into the red.

So, rather than roll out the ubiquitous predictions for 2012; I’m going to suggest that in the absence of 1.21 Gigawatts you can take a stab at future-proofing your Exchange environment now, so you’re not left thinking in future -

“I’m migrating again. Surely not? Didn’t I just finish the last upgrade?”

However the last migration or upgrade you performed was probably a little easier; the requirements were different then, and there was dramatically less data than today. The move from Exchange 2003 to 2007 was mostly about the new 64 bit hardware required, but the move to Exchange 2010 is often about the volume of data instead.

As your users make merry with the disk space allocated to the Exchange Stores, their mailboxes have grown and grown, you’re probably wondering how you’re going to move several Terabytes of data to the new Exchange platform; but, more importantly wondering when you might have to do this again. The short-term nature of IT and the constant cycle of upgrades and migrations means you may have to answer those question sooner than you expected.

One simple solution that future-proofs your migration and upgrade strategy is to deal with the data now by augmenting your on-premise Exchange with a Cloud based email management solution. Using this Cloud based email management solution is simple; the elastic and scalable nature of the Cloud lets you ‘dump’ your oversize email stores into a secure, scalable, flexible and resilient solution that will grow with you, but at the same time allow the users to have direct access to that email data through Outlook as though it was still on Exchange.

Now here’s the part of plan we don’t talk about very much, but one that provides a great degree of flexibility. When the next migration or upgrade comes around, or if you want to move from one platform to another, having already dealt with the data means your core email service i.e. Exchange, can be anywhere or anything. Upgrade, downgrade, move to Office 365 and back again, migrate some users or all users, the choice is yours; Augmenting Exchange with the cloud means you’re not tied to any one solution or version, both today and next year when it’s time to upgrade again.