Flexibility and Choice Paramount for Enterprise Exchange Solution
C24 developed a secure, enterprise Exchange solution for leading industrial services provider, ERIKS, to ensure the continued delivery of email and communications services across all sites whilst reducing delivery costs.
Warrington, United Kingdom, December 20, 2014 (Newswire.com) - BACKGROUND
ERIKS is the UK’s leading industrial services partner offering both a wide range of parts and maintenance services for all industrial sectors, ERIKS is a company with the knowhow that makes the difference.
Following Microsoft's announcement that it was discontinuing support for Exchange 2003, ERIKS recognised that they needed to implement an email and communications solution that would support them for the long term and be flexible enough to cope with future growth for their 1700 users.
ERIKS had initially looked at a range of email services hosted in the cloud, including Microsoft’s Office365 public cloud solution, as they wanted a degree of flexibility and believed that cloud could offer them the best value for money whilst being flexible enough to cope with growing email data across the organisation.
THE SOLUTION
C24 designed a dedicated Exchange 2013 solution, tailored and delivered solely to ERIKS for added security. The solution would also replicate the Exchange mailboxes between each server in their mirrored datacentres, creating high availability and resilience within the environment.
The benefit of ERIKS moving away from the idea of a shared infrastructure such as Office365 for email, to having their own dedicated hardware for this solution, meant that ERIKS could fix their costs for the next 5 years for increased financial predictability.
Due to existing considerable investment in their own enterprise datacentres, ERIKS elected to deliver the solution from their own sites, resulting in the overall upgrade project coming in lower than the cost of deploying Exchange for over 1700 users on Microsoft's Office365 public cloud solution; and having the increased benefit of having their private data stored locally on ERIKS’ own dedicated infrastructure.
OUTCOMES
The new solution also has a simple upgrade path to other Microsoft solutions like Lync Server and Sharepoint. The active-active setup of the mirrored solution between means that each Exchange server can be upgraded and patched individually with no downtime to any users.
ERIKS now have a solution that enables their users to have the latest version of Microsoft Exchange, whilst having the capacity and flexibility to grow in the future as their staff numbers and storage requirements increase.