Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/9825
FACT-BASED COMPARISON OF HOSTED SERVICES: GOOGLE VS. MICROSOFT enabling them to manage rights from the group, business application, e-mail and document levels. Active Directory can be federated with other clients and firms across the firewall and used in hybrid scenarios that combine on-premise servers with hosted services. This provides options when there is an Internet or data center outage, which online-only providers are unable to offer. Google provides anti-spam and anti-virus capabilities through Gmail and, at an additional cost, many firms already gain optional phishing and malware protection using Postini. Google does not yet support the ability to send e-mail between users with rules such as “don’t forward” or “view only,” which is a major functionality of the Microsoft Information Rights Management platform. Microsoft Exchange Online provides security tools that help protect systems from spam and viruses with Microsoft Forefront™ Security or Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering. Similar to Postini, Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering provides inbound and outbound protection from spam, viruses, phishing scams, and e-mail policy violations by employing multiple filters. Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive provides an advanced message archiving system for e-mail and instant messages. And Microsoft Exchange Hosted Encryption enables users to send and receive encrypted e-mail messages (with TLS, Kerberos, and IPSec technologies) directly from their desktops as easily as regular e-mail messages. SUPPORT AND SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS Both Microsoft and Google offer 99.9 percent availability guarantees of their hosted services. Google’s SLA defines a Downtime Period as: “For a domain, a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime. Intermittent Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted towards any Downtime Periods.” Any interruption in service of fewer than 10 minutes—no matter how frequently such downtime occurs—does not count as downtime. Google also claims to provide support 24/7, but will take phone calls only from Sunday 5:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time until Friday 5:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Microsoft does not restrict its downtime definition and users can access multilingual support by phone 24/7. Microsoft provides financial compensation for loss of service, and Google’s SLA also compensates law firms for loss of services but by providing service credits. COST COMPARISON While financial considerations are among the many touted benefits of cloud computing solutions like GAPE and Microsoft BPOS, determining the actual savings of these environments can be difficult because of the hidden costs beyond the monthly fees. Law firms must account for the financial implications related to migrating the solution, the costs related to the capabilities of the solution, user training needs, ongoing support costs, costs related to downtime, and so forth. www.iltanet.org Microsoft 37