How secure is a Hosted Exchange?
Good question!!
When customers are considering a Hosted Exchange solution, a couple of questions high on the list that we get asked are….
- What happens if the Hosted Exchange service goes down?
- Will I lose all my Hosted Exchange data?
- How do I know that my Hosted Exchange data is secure?
These are very good questions to ask and we have put together the following information to hopefully help answer these questions.
If you firstly take a look at your current environment that you may have in house. Your typical infrastructure set up may look like the below….
1 or 2 mail servers running an outdated version of Exchange, 2000 or 2003 with Outlook 2003 or less
Servers are in the working office with no 24/7 support, security or monitoring rather than in an controlled environment such as a mini datacentre.
- No backup policy
- No disaster recovery plan
- Ageing equipment
- No redundancy in place should a piece of equipment fail
- 1 contact responsible for Exchange plus many other priorities within the company
- No 24X7 technical support
- No management of software updates, patches
- Zero spam protection
- Zero anti virus protection
Now lets take a look at what we utilise to provide a secure and resilient Hosted service
- We use 3 x Highly secure UK datacentres in 3 geographical locations which are monitored 24/7/365. This means that should 1 data centre go down, your service will not be interrupted.
- Hosted Heroes is our team of experts and technicians that are on hand 24/7 to help with any questions you may have
- Advance spam and anti-virus protection
- 2 hours SLA and Disaster recovery plans
- We use only UK based high end datacentres which are N+1 facilities with all of the cooling, power and connectivity failover you would expect from N+1. All the data centres are ISO certified.
How is your back up and disaster recovery handled…
We use a new technique to backup using a system called ‘continuous data protection’ (CDP). What this means is as soon as you make a change to any file, such as a document or spread sheet. It is backed up automatically as you make changes to it. This allows our customers to restore from earlier that day, rather than only being able to restore from the backup the day before.
In the event of hardware fails, your business will continue to run with no noticeable downtime. This is completed by balancing your hosted services across multiple servers and multiple locations. In the event the hardware fails on one server, your users would automatically shift across to the next available server.
Your Virtual server environment is snapshotted across all 3 data centres with milliseconds delay behind the primary. In the event of a critical fail, you automatically be shifted to the next high availability datacentres.
The idea behind this is complete business continuity. Whether you have resilience built in, if a server fails or a power failure occurs, performance is interrupted. Shifting users across to the next high availability data centre ensure you see no noticeable downtime while the issues are resolved.
To further build on our Disaster Recovery we have a further 3 Datacentres with mirrored VM farms. We have 10GB fibre direct links between each Datacentre so in the event of a major catastrophe, we could migrate you across to the next high availability datacentres easily with no data loss.
If you want any further info on this or any other Hosted service within the cloud then please contact a Hosted Hero
Hosted Hero
Tel 0800 019 3878
