Azaleos

The choice of an in-house model, over time, often presents the following challenges:

• Control: hard for internal IT to guarantee 99.9% uptime;
• Cost: in-house personnel are costly to train and recruit, especially to insure 24x7 coverage of Exchange;
• Complexity: it continues to grow more difficult to architect, migrate, deploy, monitor and manage all aspects of the Exchange messaging system.

The choice of a hosted Exchange model also offers its own set of challenges to IT:

• Control: a hosted Exchange provider takes away your control of down-time, data confidentiality, maintenance windows and so on.
• Complexity: most of the available Hosted Exchange providers offer only multi-tenancy options and create a single point of failure for your e-mail;
• Lack of Customization: Hosters do not offer much flexibility with respect to management policies and systems architecture.

The Azaleos solution either matches or beats both the in-house as well as the hosted Exchange solution across 15 different key category areas. With Azaleos Managed Services you can maximize your control and decrease the costs and complexity associated with working with Exchange Server. Click here to access the Azaleos white paper which provides specific details on each of the 15 categories and how Azaleos matches up.

Azaleos helps IT departments offload all operations and services relating to the entire e-mail system to an Exchange specialist. This transfer of responsibilities frees up customer IT resources to focus on higher ROI value projects, increased business efficiency, innovation and profitability. Further, it allows for a highly scalable and efficient service delivery on the part of Azaleos. 

Gartner suggest that there are six critical disciplines required for optimal e-mail operations: change management, configuration management, asset management, systems monitoring, capacity management and disaster recovery. Gartner suggests that the ultimate goal "is to maximize e-mail system uptime while limiting the impact on other enterprise applications and infrastructure components." 

We can optimize Azaleos fulfillment pursuant to the 6 Gartner disciplines as follows:

• Change management: This discipline related to consideration of the impact that any code, configuration, upgrade or deployment changes have on both end-user operations and e-mail-dependent infrastructure and applications. Combining Azaleos Managed Services with our patented SecureX technology ensures a rigorous approval and testing process prior to any new versions of software, patches, hot fixes and service packs being installed.
• Configuration management: The Azaleos SecureX technology ensures an exhaustively documented picture of what the system looks like before and after any change (recording the “last known good environment,” for example) and that all system changes are tracked and maintained.
• Asset management: ViewX, the Azaleos remote monitoring technology, allows Azaleos to capture thousands of datapoints per minute detailing the performance of managed servers and related systems. Regular rules-based analysis of this data allows Azaleos to provide customers with recommendations relating to the appropriate timing relating to, for example, when it is economically attractive to eliminate a local e-mail server in favor of remote user access to e-mail, or when to add a failover server.
• Systems monitoring: Some organizations are still in reactive mode when e-mail systems go down, due to reliance on the native monitoring services of the e-mail system. These tools typically examine only vendor-specific functions and not the end-to-end performance (such as response time measurement) and health of the e-mail system. Gartner recommends investment in specialized operational monitoring and management tools - and this is exactly what Azaleos delivers.
• Capacity management: The dynamic nature of e-mail systems mandates careful consideration regarding system capacity management (such as planning, demand/capacity forecasting). To maximize performance, administrators must have a good understanding of usage patterns and peak-load metrics to determine the appropriate time for resource upgrades or configuration changes.  ViewX and its associated reporting tools can measure and predict directional changes in the Exchange systems and allow the Azaleos NOC technicians to take the appropriate actions to ensures that the messaging system remains running at peak capacity.
• Disaster recovery: Many organizations are ill-prepared for large-scale e-mail system outages, and lack appropriate backup/recovery scenarios for system-wide failures. The Azaleos Managed Continuity Service provides for the ultimate in RTO and system availability in the event of catastrophic failure.

The choice of an in-house model offers 3 major (as well as a large number of minor) pitfalls to IT as follows:

• Control: hard for IT to guarantee minimum 99.9% uptime;
• Cost: in-house personnel are costly, especially to insure 24x7 coverage of Exchange;
• Complexity: it continues to grow more difficult to architect, migrate, deploy, monitor and manage all aspects of the Exchange messaging system.

On the flipside the choice of a hosted Exchange model also offers a similar set of 3 major (as well as a substantial number of minor) pitfalls to IT in a company looking to sign on as follows:

• Control: not only are the company's e-mail data and archives located off-site, but there is no core "insurance” that if your ISP goes out of business there will be a way to regain access to your e-mail stores;
• Complexity: most of the available Exchange Servers offer only multi-tenancy options;
• Lack of Customization: Hosters do not offer much flexibility with respect to management policies and systems architecture.

The Azaleos hybrid solution either matches or beats both the in-house as well as the hosted Exchange solution across 15 different key category areas. With Azaleos OneStop services you can maximize your control and decrease the costs and complexity associated with working with Exchange Server. Click here to access the Azaleos white paper which provides specific details on each of the 15 categories and how Azaleos matches up.

In addition to our focus on around the clock Exchange expertise, there are a few other things that set apart the Azaleos services approach:

• ICONIC System: Azaleos has coined the term ICONIC which stands for Investigate, Communicate, Obtain, Notify, Implement, and Capture. ICONIC represents the Azaleos process which all of our NOC personnel live and follow when working with our customers. With any new issue that crops up we first INVESTIGATE the problem. Second, we COMMUNICATE the issue promptly to you our customer. Third, we OBTAIN authorization from the customer to institute a change (in many cases in order to quickly facilitate our pro-active actions, we may already have tacit authorization as part of the SLA). Fourth, we NOTIFY you (the customer) before making the change. Fifth, we IMPLEMENT the change. And, finally, sixth, we CAPTURE the change in your customer log so that we have a historical knowledge base of activity on your system for any NOC personnel servicing your account.
• Standardization: At Azaleos we have created a ruthlessly standardized environment which allows us to deliver an “exclusively customized messaging environment” for your company. Because we focus in on all the minute details of ensuring that the messaging systems and services map to a narrow set of standardized platform options, our NOC technicians are able to deliver a very customized set of services that best suit your companies IT requirements.
• Transparency: Azaleos employes customized SLAs (service level agreements) which help us to guarantee the delivery of 99.9% uptime (and many times even up to five 9's). While we strive for perfection, we recognize that the complexities of messaging environments today will not allow us to be perfect. We promise to keep you informed when things go wrong. We will be VERY proactive in keeping you up to date on all relevant information about the status of the services that we are providing to you.
• Focus on Your Problem: At Azaleos we view our NOC technicians as an extension of your IT staff. As a result, your biggest problem always and immediately becomes our biggest problem! Your pain is our pain and we are there 24x7 to focus on preventing that pain from ever surfacing in the first place.
• Security and Privacy: In an age of increasing regulations and stricter compliance, you need to be comfortable with security and privacy controls employed by any potential business partners. Not only is Azaleos SAS70 certified but because all SSL encrypted commands issued from the Azaleos NOC to the Exchange appliances on-premise are governed by our SLAs and executed only based on a pre-agreed AD policies, we have strict limits and controls regarding who is able to access the actual e-mail that we are managing are in place.
   

At Azaleos we have high standards for our SLAs and we back them up 24x7x365. When you partner with Azaleos you get a level of personalization, reliability and service that is unmatched in the messaging space today and which most companies do not have or cannot afford.  As a starting point for the customized SLA, Azaleos uses the following high level Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor and validate the optimized environment. Azaleos monitors thousands of other KPIs each minute, but will report on the following on a monthly basis:

• Exchange Server uptime
• Test messages via SMTP
• Message Availability via MAPI.
• Message availability via Outlook Web Access (OWA)/Web services
• Database Growth History
• Disk Space Growth History
• Daily Message Traffic
• Total E-mail Messages Sent per Month (internally and externally)
• Average Time to open Mailbox

Labor makes up approximately two-thirds of today's messaging costs and those IT personnel dedicated to messaging infrastructure represent lost productivity in other IT areas. Of course, in addition to personnel costs there are also upgrades to hardware and software, training, and maintenance. In fact, the real costs of in-house messaging are usually significantly higher than most businesses realize them to be.

Here are a few of the many ways that the Azaleos software PLUS services model approaches messaging management in a different way to the economic benefit of the customer:

• Stress testing messaging: Azaleos utilizes a multi-tiered QA system using a staging server environment to thoroughly test and pilot changes to any system. Before pushing down any patches from Microsoft or 3rd party systems, Azleos first pretesting using a rigourous process designed to ensure maximum uptime for to the customer messaging environment. This system not only takes the pilot/testing costs away from the customer but also ensures that the customer does not incur any downtime costs for patches or software updates that may take down the Exchange system if incorrectly applied.
• Single Sourcing: Azaleos provides for a full portfolio of Exchange-related monitoring, management, archiving, back-up, etc. The customer does not need to “split” its messaging services between multiple vendors.
• Personnel Savings: In order to support a 7x24 Exchange monitoring system using in-house personnel it would required a dedicated set of 4.2 IT personnel per week. By leveraging Azaleos your company can rededicate those IT personnel to other higher ROI yielding projects.
• Consulting Services: In addition to running the Exchange monitoring and management services, Azaleos will also help you to plan, size and deploy Exchange farms using our wealth of expertise built up over many client engagements to ensure a robust, secure and cost-effective deployment. This consulting cost is normally but a fraction of what most companies would otherwise pay out to more costly IT consulting companies for similar services.
• Migration and Deployment: Azaleos has a wealth of experience and a knowledge base collection of how to best architect and perform various types of migrations and deployments to Exchange. This expertise combined with the Azaleos specialized set-up and clustering services allow us to get you up and running in usually no more than 4 hours. We control the cost and timing of the deployment and pass those savings on to the customer.
• Exchange expertise: As the result of the Azaleos investment in Exchange expertise (Microsoft Gold Partner, Microsoft TAP (Technical Adoption Program) Program, MSFT Ranger/ACE, Microsoft Exchange MCP technicians, etc.) company's can save on education and training costs for IT personnel.Further, because Azaleos also invests heavily in the R&D aspects of Exchange you achieve internal development cost savings as well.

The Exchange 2010 product is expected to RTM in early October and launch and be made generally available in early November.  Azaleos is very bullish on this new version of Exchange and we will have an updated Azaleos managed service available to support the release on it ships.

It is important to also point out that support of Exchange 2010 is not mutually exlusive of Exchange 2007 support. Even once we begin to offer Exchange 2010 support in H1 2010, we will still at that time continue to offer Exchange 2007 services and support for our customers.

Exchange 2010 is built around 3 core benefit areas: Flexible deployment and management options, Information protection and compliance, and Improved end user productivity.

The deployment and management areas focus on offering HYBRID deployment options to mix on-premise and cloud-based email and simplifiying storage and DR scenarios. For protection and compliance the focus is 100% on the new archiving functionality built into Exchange. Finally for productivity improvements the target is on giving end users more control over their communications. Azaleos has assembled our own “top ten” list of new Exchange feature areas and our highly trained Exchange professionals can help to dial in the features that can help your company the most and make them available to you as part of your deployment to Exchange.

• Performance Improvements
• Storage improvements/savings (up to 85% with new optimize DAG technology)
• Archiving/Message Policy/eDiscovery/Compliance improvements
• New Unified Messaging Capabilities
• OWA (Outlook Web Access) browser client and mobile device fidelity and management improvements
• End User Productivity: Mailtips, Ignore Conversation, Conversation View
• Web Management Interface
• Rights-protected email functionality with AD Rights Management Services
• New High Availability functionality
• New Transport and Routing functionality

The following list details actual 'ripped from the headlines' (approximate date of occurence listed) dangers and pitfalls that real customers have encountered when doing business with hosted e-mail providers.

• Power truck hits a telephone pole that carries power to the Hoster server farm at the same moment that the Hoster is recycling its air conditioning units. Nov 2007 (Rackspace)
• 100% uptime advertisements by Hoster turns out to be SLA gimmicks--- Hoster pays off the SLA penalties but the productivity loss from the e-mail downtime is never recovered. Feb 2008
• Hoster also manages all of your mobile device servers --- a tornado at the Hoster server farm takes out both your Exchange server AND your mobile device e-mail services. April 2007
• Hoster advertised “expert Exchange support personnel" turn out to be mostly sales, marketing, security and administrative personnel manning the phones or forums. Sept. 2007
• Hurricane hits Hoster data center and hoster tells you that they actually don't have the advertised catastrophic DR failover plan --- your e-mail is down for two weeks. Aug. 2007
• Hoster mistakenly retains archive information well beyond a specified aging date and resulting e-discovery costs your company millions of dollars in litigation losses. April 2008
• Hoster security measures fail and your e-mail/contacts/calendar is read and copied by others. April 2008 (Gmail)
• Customer held hostage to their own data when e-mail is costly/complicated to recover while switching away from a Hoster. Jan 2008 (Intermedia)
• E-mail has major extended outages caused by contacts system failure, expired SSL certificates, and "system bugs." Aug/Sept/Oct 2008 (Gmail)
• Hoster start-up costs for move-in, bandwidth, data migration, and version upgrades are not clearly spelled out by the Hoster, causing initial ROI assumptions to be terribly skewed. March 2008
• Hacker breaks into Sarah Palin's e-mail account. Sept 2008 (Yahoo)

More often than not, leasing is the preferred option in financing an IT infrastructure environment. This is particularly true when 1) the technology replacement follows along the same industry life-cycle turnover for that specific technology; 2) a business need exists for rapid technological changes; 3) a business need exists to drive the quick adoption of a new technology; and most importantly, 4) spreading out payments and using operating funds rather than capital funds would be beneficial.

Azaleos recognizes that economic times are tough and IT departments are facing capital purchasing and hiring restrictions. In order to accomodate this market reality Azaleos offers a financing option which allows organizations faced with capital expediture limitations to migrate to Azaleos' cost-effective managed services, since the monthly subscription payment does not qualify as a capital expenditure. The financing package allows customers to wrap hardware, Azaleos OneStop managed services, and any deployment and migration services into a single and predicatable monthly subscription payment. It is designed to help enterprises migrate to Microsoft Exchange 2007, which requires new 64 bit hardware and robust attached storage for optimal performance and stability.

In uncertain economic times, IT organizations are often faced with capital expenditure freeze roadblocks or reductions, but must maintain service levels in the face of evolving business and technology requirements. With customers looking for all-in-one pricing, this Azaleos financing option allows customers to benefit from the tremendous business value built into Azaleos' services without breaking the bank or requesting an exception from corporate capital purchase restriction policies.

Azaleos takes customer privacy and confidentiality concerns seriously. In fact, a competitive advantage of Azaleos vs. traditional hosted exchange providers is that your data remains safe, private and secure behind your firewall, on your premise.

The Azaleos operations department reflects this Azaleos philosophy in both its procedures, staff and toolsets:

• The Azaleos Network Operations Center (NOC) Team consists of highly trained, Microsoft certified professionals who submit to formal background screening before joining the Azaleos organization.
• The Azaleos SecureX management platform allows Azaleos to perform maintenance and repair procedures without having direct access to customer server consoles. All actions are validated and logged by this system. Logs are monitored and audited in a multi-tiered fashion within the NOC, ensuring no single person can operate without oversight.
• Azaleos standard deployments include the lockdown of Exchange Send/Receive/Read/Write (thus mailbox access) rights to only the mailbox owner. Accounts used by the Azaleos team are expressly forbidden access to mailbox content. Any change in these rights is logged and auditable via the Windows Security logs.
• Azaleos is A SAS70 certified service provider. As such we have audited controls in place to ensure compliance.

The Azaleos backup solution is available for "FREE" as a built-in part of our overall Managed Exchange service. All backup activities and processes are tailored to suit the needs and requirements of your IT policies. The Azaleos solution utilizes Microsoft's latest backup technology called Systems Center Data Protection Manager (DPM). This technology allows us to backup the database and logs every hour. The solution also fully replicates the data to the DPM server for use in case of a disaster event.

Azaleos has chosen to standardize on DPM for four key reasons:

• Licensing cost: DPM is a fraction of the cost of other backup solutions --- many of our customer have abandoned other solutions for DPM purely based on the licensing savings.
• Supportability: DPM is 100% supported by Microsoft for backup and restore of Exchange servers. Most SAN based solutions are not supported and many third party backup suites do not follow support guidelines.
• Low management cost: Azaleos engineers are trained in DPM and can handle any issues that may come up. By standardizing on this application we can offer the service to our customers at a negligible service cost. i.e less than 1.00$/user. Like our other products we can offer SLA's on backup and restore if needed.
• Versatility: In addition to Exchange, DPM also backs up Active Directory, SharePoint, SQL Server and Virtual Server guests. This versatility allows you to get more value for your investment and to extend this backup service across your other Azaleos services.

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager is spec'ed into every Azaleos solution and implementation of DPM will provide near instantaneous backup of the Exchange Message Store. These backups (also referred to as snapshots) can occur periodically throughout the day or as often as every 15 minutes. The snapshots can then be used to verify the integrity of the data store and are made available for mailbox level restores, or full restoration of data if required.

It's important to note that while Azaleos will remotely configure, manage and oversee the back-up processes, the actual DPM Server and backup data will be located on your corporate premises.

To answer this, let’s take a look at what is going on within our Azaleos Operation teams. As we expand we are always adjusting to meet the growth with innovative ways of managing our customer base. We have recently created a new concept in managing our clients -- the POD design. POD stands for:

Proactive Approach:  The Proactive Approach is unique to Azaleos. We center our services around detection of problems before, or as soon as they occur, rather than wait for what we call your “User Alerting System” (aka when users complain). To date we monitor over 7000 different data points on Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, DPM, SQL, AD, F5, NETAPP and EMC. As we find issues that can be better diagnosed or caught before they are a problem, we add them each month.

Obsessively Focused:  Customer service is at the heart of what we do: we strive to be “the vendor that sets the bar for our other vendors” (a direct quote from one of our satisfied customers!). We hold ourselves to a very tight response policy to ensure that we are meeting the demands of our Proactive Approach. We are focused on Collaboration technologies, Exchange, OCS, Sharepoint, AD, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and we stay plugged in to those technologies.

Dedicated Teams:  Our Operations engineers are organized into teams that are assigned to oversee a limited set of customer environments. This is a distinctive approach to how we do business. Most service organizations perform their service in a staff augmentation type approach or group resources into tiers with only the top tier having any understanding of the customers' unique environment. Azaleos does things a bit differently -- we create PODS of people that take care of a limited subset of our customers and only focus on those customers. Each POD has staff on hand 24x7, not 8x7 with pagers or on calls. This means faster issue response times and the assurance that we always keep our eyes on the ball.

Of course, but first it should be stated that we pride ourselves on our predictive designs, the goals of which are to provide maximum uptime, reduce costs, and standardize configurations that we can test, validate, and keep working. Now and then we come across a design that we need to change based on issues seen in our installed base. We uncovered one of these issues recently (related to Exchange 2007) and are making both process changes and, in some cases, design changes to help with this.

The problem: (Isolated to deployments with 2 physical OneServers and Exchange 2007 CCR Clustering) If the physical server has a H/W issue and cycles down, the Exchange 2007 Cluster hosted on a virtual machine cannot failover if the File Share Witness is hosted on a VM on that Physical server.

The Solution: If there is not another box onto which we can move the FSW, we will deploy a primary/secondary process in which the FSW will be deployed on the CAS/HUB VM located on the secondary physical server. We can move the FSW to a server within the environment not under Azaleos management if the primary/secondary process is not desired. In the event there are additional OneServers/physical servers, we will move the FSW onto one of these servers.

Although Azaleos does not manage Outlook (we leave this end-user Tier 1 support for our customers to handle directly with their users) we do occassionally uncover issues concerning the interaction between Outlook and Exchange.  We either pass the issue resolution on to our customers or implement it ourselves as a NO CHARGE additional service. 

Here's an example of a recent issue:  If you run Outlook 2003 and it has not been updated with Service Pack 3 or higher it has the potential to take down the Exchange server. This happens because pre-SP 3 Outlook allows very large messages to be sent to the Exchange servers regardless of the message size limits on the server. This is a very difficult issue to resolve because the messages take a long time to receive and therefore very little logging is done on the server. The point here is that you make sure you update Outlook 2003 with SP 3 now if you haven’t done so already.