We here at the Borough of West Chester have been living in the cloud with Microsoft for email services for almost 3 years now. First we were on their older service, Microsoft Online and earlier this year we were moved to their new service, Microsoft 365. For us the move into Microsoft's cloud for email service was a "no brainer". With an IT staff of 1 and between 130-150 users to service, managing an on-premises Exchange (email) server was at times daunting and often time consuming.
One of the primary concerns for me, as well as others who have considered a change from "on premises" to "cloud" services for email specifically is uptime. I must admit that this was one of my primary concerns when I was looking to make this change almost 3 years ago. However by completing good research and interviews I was very comfortable with moving to cloud services for email. After all, it was my belief that an IT staff of 1 could never compete with the full power of Microsoft.
Now almost three years later I can look back on this decision and report that it was the right thing to do for us. Downtime has probably been less that 8 hours over these past 2+ years. Now don't get me wrong there have been hurdles from time to time with Microsoft. Some of the service issues we experienced since our move to the cloud have included:
1. Microsoft Lync continues to be problem from time to time. While it is presented by Microsoft as a easy to setup on the user end this is often not the case. I often find myself having to manually enter internal and external IP server information on many workstations during setup.
2. Microsoft Lync often has trouble connecting to our account on mobile devices, even on Windows phones!
3. When we transitioned from Microsoft Online Services to the new Microsoft 365 service, I found that many Outlook clients were not connecting. This occurred about a week prior to the scheduled upgrade. It was determined that Microsoft had changed their settings (MX records etc.) prior to actually upgrading our account! This caused Outlook clients not to connect for a few hours until we determined the actual cause which was corrected by myself and Microsoft.
4. Recently Outlook clients started to fail on connecting to Microsoft. It was determined through troubleshooting that for some reason Microsoft did not like the OpenDNS addresses we had been using on our DNS servers. The problem here is that Microsoft still has not acknowledged this as the root cause, but nevertheless by moving away from OpenDNS the connection problems were resolved. Why this actually occurred I am at a loss because we have always used OpenDNS addresses for our DNS servers.
There have been other minor issues, however overall uptime has been very good, in fact better then I could have provided managing our own internal Exchange servers.
According to an Office blog post, for the year from July 2012 to the end of June 2013, Office 365 had an uptime of 99.98%, 99.97%, 99.94% and 99.97% for each successive quarter respectively. For the sake of clarity, uptime is the amount of time that services provided by a vendor are actually available to users.
What is even better is that Microsoft promises to provide quarterly figures for uptime from here on in, which should offer current and potential users the confidence they need to sign-up, or stay signed-up if they are already customers.
Microsoft says it has calculated the uptime based on the number of minutes Office 365 was available over the course of a calendar month compared with the number of minutes in month.
Other things worth noting is that this figure was also calculated based on the number of people using any one of the given services like SharePoint, or Office Web Apps.
As these services come as a package, Microsoft said it lumped all the stats for each app and for each user together no matter what service they were using. The figures also include services for business, education users and government users.
The challenge with stats is that they can often be.... cloudy (pun intended). It should be noted that there have been times during the past 2+ years here that a part of the Microsoft service was down, while others have ben up. For example the most common outage has revolved out Outlook client connectivity. What usually happens here is that during the times we have experienced Outlook clients not connecting to the service, email continued to flow to mobile devices and the Web Outlook service. Therefore we were not completely down and I wonder if these partial service interruptions are included in Microsoft's statistics.
Cost savings are another factor to consider. For our organization, the cost savings was minimal. For us the cost of purchasing (every 3 years) then installing and maintaining the equipment and services is just about balanced out by the monthly service cost. There is also no question that cloud services will allow your organization to control or reduce staffing levels.
The cloud is here to stay, the only question is to find the right mix of "on premises" services and "cloud" services for your particular organization.
In August of 2011 Microsoft published a case study of the Borough of West Chester which can be found here.
