It’s time to migrate from Exchange Server to Office 365

With the continuing growth of cloud services, establishments are often unaware of what’s available to them or the advantages new services could bring. One of the bigger decisions for an establishment to make is to move their email from being on an in-house server (also known as on-premise) to a cloud service.

Microsoft Exchange Server is a highly popular mail and calendar server that is powerful and scaleable making it suitable for everything from small business to enterprise environments, single schools to multi-site universities. Like many other components of the Windows platform, Exchange Server requires a commitment to hardware, licensing and technical resource to implement and maintain it during its lifecycle.

Microsoft has been offering a cloud-based Office solution, Office 365, for a number of years now and in some ways it’s one of Microsoft’s best kept secrets as until recently it has been quietly growing in the background while the tidal wave of change from on-premise solutions to cloud-based services has been rising in popularity. One of the areas of Office 365 is effectively “Exchange in the cloud” which is becoming one of the most common reasons for educational and corporate environments adopting Office 365.

There is a huge amount that could be (and has been) written about the benefits of using Exchange in Office 365 but here are just some of the basic advantages:

• No need for investment in hardware to run Exchange Server on-premise.
• Avoids the expensive and complicated licensing plans associated with Exchange Server, especially with the licensing changes announced with the release of Exchange Server 2016.
• Always running the latest version, no need for patches and upgrades and the associated complications and possible downtime.
• Easier (and therefore cheaper) to administer due to only having to deal with service configuration without the need to be able to maintain the hardware and software as well.
• Lower cost of ownership and simpler licensing plans.
• No need to be concerned with backups, disaster recovery and storage. This is all dealt with as part of the Office 365 cloud services.
• Exchange online is free for most educational establishments and is available from only £2.50 monthly per user.

To put it simply, it’s understandable that an establishment may want to have on-premise domain controller(s) and file and print services but unless you have absolute need for your Exchange server to be on-premise (high data security reasons, for example), it makes a great deal more sense and is more cost-effective to put your Exchange solution in the cloud and use Office 365. For many educational establishments and companies, Office 365 is quite simply a much better option than the on-premise alternative.

Here at Corbel we can help migrate your existing mail setup to an Exchange solution in Office 365, saving you time, money and resource in the process. Our highly-experienced engineers can work with your existing IT department to ensure that the transition to your new solution is smooth and with minimal downtime. Alternatively if you are currently without an existing IT team or provider, we can assess your current setup and then design and implement the most suitable solution that meets your current needs now and in the future.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Office 365 or thinking of changing your current mail solution, talk to our team on 01473 241515 or use our contact form.