publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/192213
OVERHEARD ON E-GROUPS: XXXX IN-HOUSE VS. HOSTED EXCHANGE I think it comes down to dollars and "sense." My bias is for being on-premise. If you can manage the environment, or work with a group that can help you at a reasonable cost, I'd keep it onsite. Going to a hosted solution will solve some problems and create a thousand new ones. Here's another argument to consider: Don't move a mission-critical system like email to the cloud until you have a more comprehensive cloud strategy. Moving to a hosted solution now could make things more difficult if you decide to move other integrated systems to a different service provider in the future. Dave Rigali of Lowndes, Drosdick, Doster, Kantor & Reed, P.A. environment? For most firms, it would not. For a law firm, I would never look at the cloud for email services other than spam and archiving. If there is an outage, who do you call while management is yelling at you? Showing your attorneys the ZDNet article about a global outage won't lend much comfort to them after the fact. Many cloud providers are using Amazon AWS, and we've seen outages from them over the years. Finally, if you leave Microsoft and go with a hosted provider of any sort, it could be significantly more expensive in the future to return. You could have to buy the product all over again. For now, at least you are in an upgrade path and can continue to move forward. Mark Brophy of Rogers Townsend & Thomas It depends on your definition of hosted. If you are small and do not have a lot of in-house IT, something to look at is having a managed service you rent space from and a real Exchange Server (not cloud) from a skilled provider. The biggest gotcha in legal is all the add-ins for Outlook. Many only support on-premise connections and nothing accessed over the Internet. Do you have any copiers where you scan to email? Many hosted solutions will impose a cap on attachment size or mailbox limits. Will this fly within your While hosting Exchange would certainly come with a good number of challenges today, I believe it's only a matter of time before we'll all find ourselves planning for a hosted email services migration. We're already doing this for our DMS, learning management system, expense reporting and library resources (e-books), and we have been doing this for payroll for years. Product integrators and their products will evolve to accomodate this hosted service model shift in order to survive. I also believe cloud service provider federation will evolve and mature to make multicloud service integration a reality — and probably sooner than we all think. I agree 100 percent that this will certainly come with a lot of challenges, but with all new challenges come new opportunities. I have an outstanding team of highly skilled and very talented engineers who spend way too many precious resource cycles on day-to-day "keep the lights on" operational tasks. Using hosted services for things like Exchange and telephony could free up the time needed to focus more on innovation. As for licensing, maybe look to host Exchange, Lync and MS Office together with Microsoft. I'm keeping a close eye on how hosted Exchange services evolve and looking forward to making this move when the time is right. Rick Varju of Foley & Lardner LLP If nothing else, the Azure VM hosting by Microsoft really excites me. I saw Mark Russinovich speak about infrastructure as a service/platform as a service) (IaaS/PaaS) hosting on Azure at the SharePoint conference. It was a very eye-opening talk. If you don't have a big budget for super SANs,