Exchange 2010 is at the end of its journey, and what a long road it’s been! For many customers, it has been a workhorse product facilitating excellent communications with their employees. It’s sad to see the product go, but it’s time to look to the future, and the future is in the Microsoft Cloud with Exchange Online

What does End of Support mean for my organization?

While Exchange 2010 isn’t necessarily vanishing from the messaging ecosystem, support of the product ends in all official capacities on January 14, 2020. Additionally, Office 2010 will be hitting the end of support on October 13, 2020, which means your old desktop clients will also be unsupported within the same year. What this means is that businesses using Exchange and Office applications will be left without support from Microsoft – paid or free. End of support also means the end of monthly security updates. Without regular security updates and patches from Microsoft to protect your environment, your company is at risk.

1. Security risks – Malware protection and attack surface protection become more challenging as products are off lifecycle support. Any new vulnerability may not be disclosed or remediated.
2. Compliance risks – As time goes on, organizations must adhere to new compliance requirements – for example, GDPR was a massive recent deadline. While managing these requirements on-premises is possible, it is often challenging and time-consuming. Office 365 offers improved compliance features for legal and regulatory requirements. The most notable is that Microsoft cloud environments comply with most regulatory needs, including HIPAA, FISMA, FedRAMP, and more.
3. Lack of software and hardware support – Lack of technical support for problems that may occur such as bug fixes, stability and usability of the server, and time zone updates. Dropped support for interoperation with 3rd party vendors like MDM and message hygiene solutions can mean your end-user access can stop working. Not to mention the desktop and mobile mail solutions already deployed, or perhaps being upgraded, around this now decade-old infrastructure.
4. Speaking of old infrastructure – This isn’t just about applications and services. For continued support and to meet compliance requirements, you must migrate to newer hardware to retain, store, and protect your mailbox and associated data. Office 365 absolves you of all infrastructure storage costs. That is a perfect opportunity, and often a justification in and of itself, to move to the cloud.

It’s time to migrate to Office 365 . . . Quickly!

There are many great reasons to move your exchange environment to a hosted environment in Office 365. The biggest one being your company will no longer have to worry about infrastructure costs.

Here are some other significant advantages that you won’t have to worry about:

• Purchasing, and maintaining expensive storage and hardware infrastructure
• Time spent keeping up to date on product, security, and time zone fixes
• Time spent on security patching OS or updating firmware
• Cost for licensing OS or Exchange Servers
• Upgrading to a new version of exchange; you’re always on the latest version of Exchange in Office 365
• Maintaining compliance and regulations for your infrastructure whether Industry, Regional or Government
• With an environment of thousands of users and potentially unlimited mailboxes, absolving your admins from the day-to-day database, storage, server, and failover management is a huge relief and cost savings by having your team focus on Exchange administration.

Another big cost for on-premises is storage: data repositories for mailbox data retention, archiving, and journaling. This value cannot be overstated – do you have large mailboxes or archive mailboxes? Are you paying for an archiving or eDiscovery solution? If you consider Exchange Online Plan 2 licenses (often bundled into larger enterprise licenses such as E3 or E5) they allow for archive mailboxes of unlimited size. These licenses also offer eDiscovery and compliance options that meet the needs of complex organizations.

The value of the integrated cloud-based security and compliance resources in the Office 365 environment is immense. Many of our customers have abandoned their entire existing MDM solutions in favor of Intune. Data Loss Prevention allows you to protect your company data against exfiltration. Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection fortifies your environment against phishing attacks and offers zero-day attachment reviews. These technologies are just the tip of the iceberg and can either replace or augment an existing malware and hygiene strategy. And all these solutions specifically relate and interoperate with Exchange Online.

Some other technologies that seamlessly work with Exchange Online and offer integral protections to that product as well as other Microsoft cloud and SaaS solutions:

• Conditional Access – Precise, granular access control to applications
• Intune – Device and application management and protection
• Azure AD Identity Protection – Manage risk levels for associate activity
• Azure Information Protection – Classify and protect documents
• Identity Governance – Lifecycle management for access to groups, roles, and applications

Think outside the datacenter

There are advantages to thinking outside the (mail)box when considering an Exchange migration strategy to the cloud. Office 365 offers an incredible suite of interoperability tools to meet most workflows. So while we can partner with you on the journey to Office 365, don’t overlook some of the key tools that are also available in the Microsoft arsenal. These include OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Teams; all of which could be potential next steps in your SaaS journey! Each tool is a game-changer in their own right, and each will bring incredible collaboration value to your associates.

AIS has helped many customers migrate large and complex on-premise environments to Office 365.

Whether you need to:

• Quickly migrate Exchange to Exchange Online for End of Support
• Move File services to OneDrive and SharePoint Online for your Personal drives/Enterprise Shares/Cloud File Services
• Adopt Microsoft Teams from Slack/HipChat/Cisco Teams
• Migrate large and complex SharePoint farm environments to SharePoint Online

Whatever it is, we’ve got you covered.

What to do next?

Take action right now, and start a conversation with AIS today. Our experts will analyze the current state and rollout migration of your organization to Office 365 quickly and seamlessly.

To accelerate your migration to Office 365, let us provide you a free Modern Workplace assessment to evaluate comprehensively:

• Organization readiness for adoption of Office 365 (Exchange and desktop-focused)
• Desktop-focused insights and opportunities to leverage Microsoft 365 services
• Develop total cost of ownership (TCO) for migrating Exchange users to Office 365 including fees for licensing
• Migration plans cover detailed insights and approaches for service migrations such as…
  • Exchange to Exchange Online
  • File servers, personal shares, and Enterprise shares to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online
  • Slack / HipChat / Cisco Teams to Microsoft Teams
  • SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online

Wrapping Up

Migrating your email to Office 365 is your best and simplest option to help you retire your Exchange 2010 deployment. With a migration to Office 365, you can make a single hop from old technology to state-of-the-art features.

AIS has the experience and expertise to evaluate and migrate your on-premise Exchange and collaboration environments to the cloud. Let us focus on the business of migrating your on-premises applications to Office 365, so you can focus on the business of running your business. This is the beginning of a journey, but something AIS is familiar and comfortable guiding you to seamless and successful cloud migration. If you’re interested in learning more about our free modern workplace assessment or getting started with your Exchange migration, reach out to AIS today.