Many organizations using Microsoft Exchange are contemplating on moving their Email and messaging to the Microsoft 365 public cloud.
Now with Hosting Controller hybrid-cloud controller , you can manage your on-premises MS Exchange and the Microsoft 365 cloud together as a single mail organization.
Hosting Controller supports different configurations between the two.
In this configuration, some users within the same ‘Organizational Unit (OU)’ are running on-premises while others are running from the cloud.
In this configuration, for the same user, some apps are running on-premises while other apps are running in Microsoft 365 online cloud.
Typical use-case for such a configuration is when an organization wants to retain its email on legacy on-premises Exchange server but wants access to other applications only available online mostly commonly Microsoft Teams or others like Yammer etc.
In this configuration, the on-premises Exchange is fully synchronized with online Microsoft 365
instance including synchronization of email data in near real-time.
Typical use-case for such a configuration is ‘migration readiness’ or ‘disaster recovery’. The
organization can choose to switch from on-premises Exchange to Microsoft 365 just by a minor DNS
switch without having to copy any large amounts of email and other data.
Such configuration incurs double the cost for the whole duration that double instances are
maintained. Costs will go down to normal when one of the two instances is de-commissioned.
Different organizations view their costs differently. Costs in the cloud are usually higher than on-premises deployments.
Some regulatory restrictions require data to physically reside within geographical boundaries of a country. Others may require some data to stay in specially certified and fortified regions. For all such cases, the on-premises installations have already been compliant for the required mailboxes.
Some features may only be available in the cloud instance. Users who need those features may be moved to the cloud.
Microsoft Exchange on-premises installations are usually full of third party tools and integrations. They could with other on-premises applications, hosted applications like CRM, SMS, Spam Filters, Conferencing tools and others.
On-Premises Exchange allows organizations to take backups as and when needed and keep their backup data at whatever location they want. They can also run different analytics on that data. Online Exchange offers limited capacity to handle backup data.
As organizations move to the cloud, there is an inherent risk of foreseen and unforeseen situations. It may be desirable as a company objective to keep rollback readiness at all times should the organization choose to move back to on-premises Exchange.
While Exchange offers multiple high-availability technologies, they still suffer from a ‘single cause of failure’ where an incidence at the master location, may sabotage all the slave locations. Hybrid technologies offer a different plane of such risk mitigation where one set of data is maintained by the IT staff within an organization and the other set is maintained by engineers at Microsoft cloud.
Microsoft Exchange is not designed as a cloud hosted application. It requires continuous involvement of IT staff and most admis tasks are still done by executing powershell commands.
Many organizations plan to move to Microsoft 365 to get benefits of a cloud hosted service. Hosting Controller with Microsoft Exchange module enables organizations to transform their existing on-premises MS Exchange into a private cloud making their on-premises experience very similar to cloud hosted with Microsoft 365. They get:
Dashboards for IT Admin staff
Best security practices
A permanent hybrid configuration enables co-existence of on-premises Exchange with the Microsoft 365 public cloud.
Different configurations are possible.
Mailbox Partitioned Configuration
App-Partitioned Configuration
Individual user accounts can be moved from on-premises Exchange to the cloud (onboarding) or can be moved from cloud back to on-premises (offboarding) without any downtime.
Phased migration enables moving mailboxes from on-premises Exchange to cloud one at a time. Since a typical mailbox is between 10GB to 100GB of data, the movement goes slow. Such a process enables an organization to move at its own pace choosing few mailboxes to migrate at a time, all without any downtime.
In a typical cut-off migration all things are planned in advance and Migrate! button is pressed in the end. Because of enhanced configuration of MS Exchange, mailboxes continue to operate without any downtime while migration is taking place, but in the end the source infrastructure is redundant and is scheduled to be retired. Hosting Controller Efflux Migrator product is designed for such migrations.
On-premises Microsoft Exchange running in your own data center is not a complete ‘Private Cloud’ out of the box. It requires a ‘Control Panel’ software to provide features of a private cloud. Hosting Controller is a complete control panel providing automation for Microsoft Exchange and other related applications.
Learn more about our hosted Exchange module and see how it manages the on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server 2019, 2016 & 2013.
Hybrid Multi-Cloud Control Panel
AD Connect Sync
AD Self Service Portal
Efflux Migrator
Mail Data Migrator
MS Exchange Module
MS SharePoint Module
AD Management Module
MS Skype For Business Module
Web Apps Module
Virtualization Module
RDS Module
ExSign
rebuildXpress
Click & Install Apps
HC Marketplace
