Organisations should consider deploying Microsoft Office 365 in a hybrid model, as this will allow them to federate their on-premise Exchange with Office 365.
This is the view of Heino Gevers, security specialist at Mimecast, who points out that more organisations in SA are migrating to Office 365.
"The most encouraging factor why organisations are considering the adoption of Office 365 within SA is the promise of not having to implement on-premise messaging and collaboration infrastructure, thus eliminating the need for costly overheads associated with the deployment and management of their own messaging environments," says Gevers.
He explains that all Office 365 plans are paid for on a subscription basis as opposed to the native Exchange licence model. This enables organisations to scale their businesses without the need for capital expenditure to support their business growth. Furthermore, a subscription model permits organisations to only pay for the Office 365 services they need, and, at any time, enables them to add functionality should the need arise, he notes.
Infrastructure challenge
However, Gevers says that, as with any developing country, there are a number of challenges that will inhibit the adoption of a cloud-based service delivery model.
He points out that the reliability of infrastructure, which provides for international connectivity to permit access to Office 365, is the most prominent challenge. "Although organisations might have heavily invested in connectivity to ensure there is enough capacity and redundancy to optimise user experience, when working with a cloud-based service such as Office 365, there is still infrastructure at play that is not under their control, such as the Seacom cable."
He says any form of outage or latency on international connectivity will severely impact customers in SA and essentially cut them off from the rest of the world should they not be able to connect to Office 365.
According to Gevers, migrating existing and legacy e-mail archive information to Office 365 over international bandwidth is another key challenge. "The reality is bandwidth within SA is still very expensive compared to other countries, and therefore, migrating terabytes of information across the Internet to Office 365 will by no means be a cheap and simple exercise."
Hybrid boost
Gevers says organisations, therefore, should consider deploying Office 365 in a hybrid model, which will allow them to federate their on-premise Exchange with Office 365. "This way, users connected to the on-premise Exchange can continue to work in the event that connectivity to Office 365 is hampered."
He adds that a hybrid model permits organisations to maintain an on-premise e-mail archive, which eliminates the requirement for migrating a legacy e-mail archive across the Internet to Office 365. However, he explains, this approach dilutes the Office 365 value proposition of not having to manage any on-premise infrastructure.
Alternatively, he says, the adoption of a local cloud-based information management service that can augment with Office 365 allows organisations to reap all of the benefits of Office 365 without the dependencies of international connectivity or the need to migrate data across bandwidth.
"Such a cloud service should be able to ingest legacy e-mail archive information without the need for bandwidth and provide full continuity in the event of an international or local connectivity outage, while permitting users to continue to communicate seamlessly, internally and externally," says Gevers.
"The cloud-based service should also support any form of Office 365 configurations such as a hybrid model."
Mimecast last week unveiled a range of cloud services and service bundles, which it says are designed to enhance the core capabilities of Microsoft Office 365 in the areas of archiving, continuity and security.
The company says the solutions address a common need for extended compliance, governance, security and e-mail continuity capabilities.
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