10 arguments against email migration to Microsoft cloud

Today, everything offers to transfer their data to the cloud, from stalls to international corporations. And if there is no question of storing your photos from vacation, in the case of corporate data there are always a lot of questions and doubts. For example, is it worth transferring company email to Microsoft Exchange Online or Exchange 2016 On-Premises cloud services, or is it better to keep your own email service? Let's see what authoritative experts in the field of Microsoft Exchange think about this topic.

Those who work with Exchange 2013 or 2016 can use the latest Microsoft e-mail developments. High availability, Site Resiliency and so on. What else to add to this? Why change the usual scheme, move the boxes in Exchange Online, and even pay for it?

Of course, now there are new ways of communication, which were originally born "cloud" - Facebook, Yammer. But email is over 20 years old. And it feels like when the new-fangled services are replaced by even more new-fangled ones, e-mail is still not going anywhere. What can the cloud give us?

Panelists:
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Tony Redmond (Tony Redmond): author of a number of books on Microsoft Exchange - Exchange Inside Out, leads the author's column in Windows IT Pro, and has multiple Microsoft MVP status.








Greg Taylor: Product Manager, Exchange Customer Experience Team. He was responsible for the most advanced training program and certification of Microsoft Exchange Certified Master.








Ross Smith: occupies a position similar to Greg, but in the area of ​​Office 365.








Scott (Shnol) Scott Schnoll: in the past - Senior Content Developer in the Exchange Server team, and now - Senior Program Manager in the Office 365 CXP Market Development team. He is the author of dozens of the most technically complex sessions dedicated to Microsoft Exchange.






Office 365 is a completely different environment. With a different scheme of product development, operation and management.

More resources. Much more than the average CIO approves. You never have enough servers, storage space, everything is always in short supply. And in the cloud everything is there.

Better integration with other applications. Do you remember how much pain it cost to set up the integration of SharePoint and Exchange, which is more like shamanism with a tambourine? Everything will work in the cloud, because the people who serve it, pay for it - and there is nobody to blame. They will not leave work until it works.

And, we believe, Exchange Online is safer than in most On-Premises installations.

When something breaks in Office 365, nobody knows what's going on. Everyone is opening up Facebook, Twitter, blogs and starting to figure out how global the problem has been — broken by everyone, or by one person. In On-Premises there is monitoring, there are warnings - if something breaks, I will know about it first.

Tony : You control everything and see what exactly broke - the network, the server, the application, or maybe there was a problem with the external connection. You control everything and you can fix it yourself.

Recently, Office 365 globally "fell" four times. And no one had any information about what was going on! When something broke in Office 365, diagnostics in the form of a social survey via Twitter is more informative than any other way. Microsoft is the last one to tell you about the problem. Why do we need all these adventures when there is reliable On-Premisesises?

Greg : The monitoring we did in Exchange On-Premises is not that good :) I’d rather believe that your users will report problems with the mail than monitoring does. And it will be so - the director will call and say that his letter does not leave.

And in case of breakdowns in Office 365, you have a great Service Health Dashboard, which shows how a particular service feels. And all the messages about breakdowns and scheduled maintenance, you will learn from the Message Center.

Tony : All this is nothing more than the fruit of Greg's imagination. Usually there is no breakage information in the Service Health Dashboard.

Greg : Then you can call tech support, she answers 24 * 7. You tell us about the problem, we understand. Well, the fact that the Service Health Dashboard is not updated, it means that it broke with Exchange. In this case, we have a backup option - Emergency Broadcast Center, to which you will be automatically redirected. And if he breaks, then ... In general, we are planning many more improvements in terms of self-diagnosis.

Office Graph technology, which tracks employee activity, and Office Delve, which provides global search on all cloud data, leave the impression of a “Big Brother” looking after you.

Tony : Microsoft is slowly gathering information about which email messages employees send to each other, how many meetings they participate in, as well as 40 other parameters of your work. Soon, Office 365 will learn to look at whether you have fallen asleep at an important meeting, and immediately send a report to the authorities immediately.

But companies that respect employee privacy (I wonder if there are any?) Do not want Office Graph to write down related metadata. Working in Office 365, you can’t get rid of the feeling that your every move has been studied and recorded.

Even if you need such information, you can extract it from Exchange without Office 365.

Greg : But global monitoring opens up amazing opportunities. You can find out:

• with whom the employee works most closely;
• which documents and agenda are most relevant to my colleagues at the moment;
• what matters most to my boss;
• how many more employees are working on the same task.

And all this information can be used in related products. You can improve your content management or control system by passing on data about which documents your employees create and what information they exchange.

Microsoft does not back up Office 365. In general! Backups are good. And if the administrator or user does something irreparable? Or does a cipher virus attack us, and then you need to recover the data? What then?

Tony : Exchange administrators have the same data protection mechanisms as in Office 365. We make additional copies of databases, enable retention for mail items, set up the storage time for deleted mailboxes. But in some cases, a warm tube backup is vital.

Ross : We use Native Data Protection, which replicates data between 4 data centers in each region. And even when you delete a user, in fact, he is not deleted, and his box is stored even longer than soft-deleted in On-Premises. You can disable the bad, dangerous cmdlets.

We believe that backing up as protection against malware is the wrong way. A good antivirus will protect you from data loss much more reliably. We have very advanced remedies. Now even the “0 hour auto delete” mechanism has appeared, which deletes emails with malware, even if they fall into the mailbox.

So neither we nor you need backups in Office 365.

Exchange is at the center of the complex ecosystem we have built for our business goals. If you go to Office 365, it seems we will need expensive improvements.

Tony : The success of SharePoint and Exchange is mainly based on the fact that there is a large ecosystem of independent developers who modify products to meet business requirements, closing Microsoft's gaps.

With respect to Exchange, it is monitoring, security, journaling, archiving, working with electronic signatures. Office 365 is a killer of innovation. It is sad.

Greg : We left you with Autodiscover, EWS, REST, Auth / Oauth and many other abbreviations - use them as an interface for your applications to work, and everything will be fine. It’s time to write a loud-ready application.

Make users a quota of 50 GB - just encourage them to trash the mailbox. If such a quota is needed, taking into account how well Exchange 2016 works with JBOD, then we ourselves can make a storage of such capacity for very modest money, without Office 365. What should we admire?

Greg : Sometimes a lot is too much. Unlimited space leads to the collection of advertising mailings, no one bothers to remove garbage.

Huge mailboxes make it difficult to search for compliance systems. And if the requirements of the regulator oblige you to keep copies (backups) of mailboxes for the next 200 years, then you will definitely fall into a difficult situation.

Tony : Actually, it's fantastic - to keep everything without rotation, archiving and other labor-intensive processes. And this, finally, is your chance to get rid of ABSOLUTE EVIL - damned pst-files. Let people finally concentrate on their work, instead of sticking letters on a bunch of archive files.

In the provinces, the Internet often does not work very well. Apparently, the cloud in such cases is not an option.

Greg : This is, of course, the Achilles heel of cloud storage. But now the situation with the Internet is improving. Although we have one client on the oil platforms in the North Sea, there is a “radio system with a tropospheric signal reflection.” So, during the storm, it does not work very well. Therefore, we have scripts for offline access. Our clients use Exchange even on submarines, and some people launch Outlook in space.

But even if you have an excellent Internet connection, you may encounter problems with reliable data transfer. Last mile problems, with intermediate providers, have been known for a long time. That is why in recent years we have made a huge investment in improving Outlook operation with Exchange under conditions of unreliable connection.

Tony : I have been using Office 365 since its inception. I used it in dozens of countries, in different hotels with terrible internet. So, there was not a single case so that I could not access my box. Yes, maybe not through Outlook, this fat pig. On access through the browser (OWA) and ActiveSync always worked.

Yes, I have not been on submarines and in space, but in all other places Office 365 worked.

I do not trust Microsoft with my confidential information. Who can be sure that they do not view it and do not sell it to the government?

Tony : In On-Premises, you control everything. Servers, network, storage system. But if you lose control of your private data, it can be a disaster. Yes, Microsoft is showing some success by upholding in court the right not to give the US government access to mailboxes located in Ireland. But ... In some cases, they will be required to do so. We'd better keep our mail with us.

Scott : Office 365 meets a variety of information security standards. Microsoft lawyers are on your side, the best experts in the field of information security, and the information about how we protect your data is completely open.

On the other hand, no matter what you bought, Exchange On-Premises or Online - from this moment all your data already belongs to us. Joke.

Tony : Somehow it is not very convincing.

Scott : Actually, we are absolutely serious. To be honest, Microsoft knows the product better, we have more resources, and our administrators are more professional than most others. Yes, in On-Premises you can handle data very, very carefully. But for the majority of clients, we make such a service that they can never do on their own.

Office 365 requires customers to keep their software platform up to date. You need to constantly update Exchange 2016 (for hybrid scripts) and Outlook so that it can connect to the cloud. Too much effort, too little return.

Tony : Every day, Microsoft releases a huge amount of changes that are not clear why they are needed, and which you did not order, but they will happen anyway. And you need to keep up with them - update everything that is updated. How do you explain this avalanche of changes to users, when functionality appears and disappears. And it is impossible to control. Innovation is great. But sometimes I would like to take a breather from these endless upgrades in the midst of the closing of the fiscal year.

Greg : And in On-Premises you also need to be updated regularly, otherwise you will get stuck in the Stone Age. Most products are updated automatically, for example, Office. Approve updates - and there are no problems. Disapprove, and get security issues. We update you very carefully. This is not a scenario like “bang, and nothing works,” most of the updates you just do not notice.

Public folders are a technology that many customers still want to use. Why should we just throw it away, wasting time changing processes and exploring new collaboration tools? How many Microsoft did not try to "kill" them, they always returned.

Greg : I have nothing to say in favor of shared folders. Just shared folders are NOT an OPTION. And that's all.

Tony : Public Folders were pretty good in 1996. They survive like a cockroach. But now we need new ways of working together. It's time to bury them.

Microsoft will support Exchange 2016 until 2025. So we can take the time to migrate to Office 365.

Greg : Yes, Exchange has 10 years of technical support. And even if customers need longer maintenance, then there are options. But what will you do with him in 2025? Many of you work with Exchange 2000? Want to work in On-Premises - please. But if you want to work with the most advanced secure technology - welcome to Office 365.

Tony : Maybe Exchange 2016 is the latest version of Exchange. May be. I do not know the plans of Microsoft. But no matter how hard it is to say, his time has passed. You should not be the last passengers of a sinking ship. It seems to me that in the next 10 years, serious changes will await us.

We see how cloud technologies are evolving, how much dynamics and innovation they have. But this does not happen with the usual On-Premises product. Look, all we have is small but useful cumulative updates. And the new technologies that come with them, only the adaptation of those that are already available in the cloud.

Do you want an old-kind-reliable server with On-Premises software? You are welcome. But if you want to follow innovations, use the most advanced achievements, then you have the only option. Go to the cloud. Microsoft slogan - mobile first, cloud first. There is no On-Premises space.

Whatever you decide for yourself - go to the cloud, or stay in On-Premises - this is your choice. We just gave you some food for thought. Thanks for attention.