* Why you should consider a hybrid hosted/on-premise type of managed service
Osterman Research has been studying the market for hosted messaging services since its inception in 2001, and I had been studying the market for several years before that. Among organizations that are resistant to the notion of using a hosted messaging service, a common and recurring theme is the concern about sensitive corporate data residing outside the firewall. There is a certain security that many find in storing business records contained in the corporate messaging system on-premise and not at a remote data center. In several studies, we have found roughly one-half of messaging decision-makers firmly entrenched in their desire to keep things on-premise.
While storing data at a hosted provider’s data center is almost always extremely secure, Azaleos has developed a very good solution that combines the best of Exchange hosting with on-premise management. Azaleos OneServer – which is also available in a virtual edition based on VMware Infrastructure – is a set of on-premise appliances that are managed remotely by Azaleos’ network operations center technicians. Azaleos offers various services that allow organizations to archive their data to secondary storage, remote monitoring and management of the on-premise infrastructure, and reporting capabilities.
Why consider this type of managed service? For starters, it allows organizations to re-deploy their IT staff to initiatives and projects that might make better use of their talents. That’s the same argument that can be used for using hosted messaging services. However, the Azaleos approach offers this advantage plus the ability to keep all of your data behind your own firewall on your own storage systems. That means that if a comet was to land on Azaleos’ network operations center tomorrow, your Exchange infrastructure would continue to run unabated (but you would have to find someone else to run it).
The Azaleos solution is in use by a growing number of companies and is definitely worth a look by organizations that are interested in understanding how a specialist provider can handle their messaging infrastructure efficiently with a very high level of uptime (Learn more about MESSAGE ARCHIVING products from our MESSAGE ARCHIVING Buyer’s Guide).
