Answering With The Cloud
Every new wave of technological advancement brings nuances that make it difficult to make the exact comparison to the problems old technology solved. The easiest way to promote the new stuff is to talk about all the new great things it does, but what do you say when you are questioned about things that are no longer a problem in the 21st century?
One of the questions we are usually asked is if a company has enough bandwidth to rely on Hosted Exchange.
Fair question. When the small company first started it’s Exchange deployment in late 90’s early 00’s it had all it’s employees in one site and every desktop was on the LAN. Fast forward to 2013 where most employees have mobile phones that are in constant sync with the Exchange deployment over the WAN. Remote offices, road warriors, executive laptops at home – now each user has several devices connecting to the Exchange server at the office and there would be actual net savings in bandwidth if the Exchange server went to the cloud!
To be fair, these “infrastructure concerns” are typically coming from the IT employee who is trying to protect his job with inferior solutions: Your sales process should focus on actual business operations concerns around business continuity, security and compliance. Here are some ways to differentiate the cloud model with the DIY model.
Just how reliable is the cloud version? What happens when it goes down?
Well it uses the same software that you would run in your office so it is comparable to your existing experience. The difference with the cloud is that the systems are much larger and far more redundant so they can conduct more maintenance without affecting operations because it’s not a single server. Maintenance keeps small problems from becoming big problems and when there are issues they are posted here so you know exactly what is going on.
Cloud Exchange is also redundant across two data centers so if there is a networking issue that impacts one you will still be in business.
In the event of a catastrophic outage, where your cloud Exchange is actually down, you can rely on ExchangeDefender LiveArchive which gives you last year worth of email including all your contacts, calendars and appointments with full realtime access to send and receive even over a mobile device.
What about backups? What if they go out of business? How can I be sure I have my data?
You’re protected in several ways, the most immediate one being Outlook 2013 cached mode. Because Outlook 2013 is included for free we will upgrade all your workstations to store all your email locally on your workstations or laptops so it will be protected by the local backups first.
We also provide business level backups of your entire organization and we can do it on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis so you can snapshot your mail and keep it here or off site in a safe deposit box on a portable USB hard drive. We can even automate the process by keeping this information on BDR systems in our data center.
There is also an option for Compliance Archiving – we can store up to 10 years of email and have it available for immediate search without additional devices or appliances. It’s just another service available to protect your data.
To be honest, the concept of backups worked in the old days where organizations had small servers or single instance storage with a single RAID – cloud deployments are scalable, using multiple servers with DAG that keeps copies of the data in multiple locations. Because these systems are built for scale they offer more flexibility and more data copies – but we can certainly help you sleep easier at night by providing these additional services that make sense if you’re not so sure about the cloud.
What about security? I hear the cloud is hacked a lot! I have compliance to worry about as well.
The threat of having your security compromised is real regardless of where your Exchange is. One thing you can be sure of is that providing the level of monitoring and security layers available in the cloud would make an office server solution very expensive. ExchangeDefender provides stated Security Procedures document, Data Destruction Document, is SSAE 16 certified and undergoes multiple security audits every year – how about your IT employee?
We already mentioned Compliance Archiving, the system that gives you realtime access to 10 years of your email, where you can quickly locate any inbound, outbound and even interoffice email that matches search criteria. If you have HIPAA concerns, ExchangeDefender will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) so you’re covered and have full access to your mail without worrying if it has been tampered with by the IT staff.
Security is really a matter of monitoring, technology and user awareness. ExchangeDefender has a lot more resources and higher end firewalls and DDoS protection service to address security problems when they pop up, patch the systems quickly because it can offline redundant servers, filter suspicious traffic and more that we cannot do affordably for you in the office. But what we can do is implement requirements for password rotation, we can deploy RSA SecurID for one-time passwords, we can monitor usage patterns and more.
Summary
Sometimes it’s hard for people stuck in the old model of IT to quickly accept how change has provided for better solutions to old IT problems. The key to a successful client relationship and a sale is not to argue some preconceived notions about IT but to explain the advances in technology and all the better stuff they will get from the cloud.
While everything about technology can be debated endlessly by the tech world, technical implementation to suit business has been taken out of the clutches of IT departments and placed into control of executives who have a more practical view of technology. Try asking two IT people: “What’s the best way to backup data” and see how many answers you get. Asking an executive will get you a different, more practical answer: We need to be able to continue work as usual within X hours but we need to have access to Y years of data in case of an audit.
ExchangeDefender and our partners are constantly evolving the best technology and the best local people around the world to solve these IT problems. Sometimes starting the conversation and framing it in a way to explain the advancement we’ve had in the past two decades when it comes to email is more difficult than just providing the solution. We hope this helps and if you need more info please do not hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
ExchangeDefender Reputation Scoring
When you send an email through ExchangeDefender it is checked for the presence of viruses, malware, SPAM and other dangerous content. It is our responsibility to make sure that the mail crossing the network, both in and out, is safe and that we are notcontributing to the flood of junk across the Internet. This is the story of our outbound network and it’s working great.
We also have another network, outbound-jr (affectionately nicknamed junk relay) where the rules are a little more relaxed. Some organizations have business case scenarios thatrequire them to send out null sender messages (maintenance, bounces, oof replies), some like to send bounces, some have massive email notification systems (RMM, transactions, etc) and they are on the line of legitimate andjunk mail as a choice. Since junk classification is handled by computers, (not humans), sometimes-legitimate mail is not being accepted for delivery.
A change that we are considering implementing, is a stricter set of monitoring and access restriction controls on outbound-jr. The first of these is a restriction on open SMTP ports, which often contributes to open relay mass mailings. This can be accomplished by rolling out a service that will deny access to outbound-jr if a client’s port 25 is accessible from the Internet (outside of the ExchangeDefender network). Traditionally this has been managed by IT departments and partners, but with a constant barrage of overly aggressive SPAM methods, the ability for most to manage this without security threats or incidents is an overwhelming issue.
To counter these threats and provide the most effective and best solution possible for our partners, we are soliciting feedback and beginning the alerting process to clients that have port 25 open without IP restrictions to the ExchangeDefender network. If there are no major objections to enforcing IP restrictions to port 25 (after all, if you have external client that requires SMTP relay access they can always use the SSL port) then we are considering adding this as a service requirement.
Thoughts? Opinions? Let us know via phone, chat, support tickets or just email me at vlad@ownwebnow.com
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender Service Check
Although I can’t talk about our major initiative until the webinar next week, we have a ton of new stuff we’re developing on the backend to make your life easier. First of many that I have the pleasure of announcing is the ExchangeDefender Validation Wizard:
ExchangeDefender Validation Wizard gives you the ability to eliminate/isolate problems on the ExchangeDefender network through the same process our team uses and through the same systems our engineers rely on. The beta is available at: http://www.exchangedefender.com/check.php
Simply plug in the mailbox email and password and our wizard will troubleshoot things end to end and line up with our best practices:
Validation Wizard
What the wizard actually does is even more important to understand: this is not some simple database field validation tool. It actually opens connections to the live backend servers, tests connections, looks up DNS records and does everything that technicians typically do by hand.
Exchange Mailbox: Wizard will first check the password and authentication credentials against the live CAS server. If this check fails it means you have the wrong email/password combo. Please note that this check validates the actual connection, not what is in the control panel. If your user went around you and reset their password via OWA then just remember the best practice to reset it right back to something you can support.
MX Record Check: After the mailbox is verified as live and online, system will check the DNS for the correct MX and Autodiscover records. This is particularly useful in the mail troubleshooting process when email delays and missing emails are a problem. Clients tend to have incorrect, missing or external MX records in their delivery list and more often than not this is the culprit to missing and delayed email. Every now and then we also find that the domain record registration had expired (and as it’s the last thing we ever check it’s among the most frustrating)
Network Connectivity: As the test implies, we check the connectivity to clients CAS, HUB and Mbox server to check on the backend and identify any potential bottlenecks that could be affecting connectivity.
Mail Services Check: The extension of the network test, in which we go through all the web, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, CAS and MAPI services to make sure the clients mailbox is setup correctly, mail flows as it should and there aren’t any “weird” issues on the backend such as a mailbox that is locked out, over quota, possessed by email gremlins and so on.
Piece of a Proactive Puzzle
As you can tell, we are putting more and more pieces together that allow us to deliver a truly managed service throughout the cloud. Typical cloud service checks verify that the servers are online and functioning but the truth is that there are typically dozens of servers and multiple data centers involved in service delivery and the transparency to the backend can at times make it impossible for a third party to effectively troubleshoot the service.
By extending the access of our backend into your hands we feel we can deliver powerful functionality in a very easy to use and manage tool set. Even though PowerShell access is available, we find it that few have the capability to rely on it and every time you have to do something manually through PowerShell you will waste more time than you expected. Not to mention that the testing has to be layered in order to make sense.
Our business model calls for us to further simplify and eliminate the hassle of email issues. By transferring these complex, procedural and often poorly documented best practice and troubleshooting sets to a simple, easy to use and cleanly presented service we can eliminate a huge cost and open up our portfolio to delivering managed mail services that are not conditional on the infrastructure problems.
I certainly look forward to sharing everything we’re up to here but I think you can agree that it helps when we’re on the same page 
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(407) 536-VLAD
Shockey Monkey launches native app for Android phones & tablets
We are proud to announce that Shockey Monkey is now available for download on your Android device. This app does require Android version 4.0 and higher in order to install and take advantage of its great features. Now you can take your service desk with you on the road and never again be stranded without knowing exactly what support issues await your arrival.
Google Play Link – Shockey Monkey
We’ve taken the feedback from our previously release BETA that was published to the iPad to enhance this experience. The Shockey Monkey app now supports background synchronization, so you are no longer stuck sitting and watching a loading screen for long periods of time. You also now have complete control over your companies & contacts, with the ability to dial them from the application.
We’ve implemented an advanced synchronization module that will feed information efficiently and provide you with more accurate and up to date information. You have access to all of your open tickets within your portal and can easily navigate, update and retrieve critical information from these tickets. This become critical when you are on the road and forget your job details or new jobs come in within a moment’s notice!
We also have more good news!
We are so pleased with the outcome of this new app, that we are pushing the changes onto the Apple iOS version as well. We have already finished the iPhone port and are making the updates to the iPad app currently. We hope that by the end of the month both of these new mobile apps will be available via the iTunes and you can take Shockey Monkey anywhere your job takes you!
Hank Newman
The Truth About Cloud Services
If you attended our last webinar (will be posted for download in our portal next week) you already know what I’m going to say: Winning in the cloud has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with good customer service. The technology of implementation, scalability, redundancy, system capacity and long term legacy use are terms both distant and hard to differentiate for most clients from SMB to enterprise: If you meet their compliance requirements the question of whether you will make money in the cloud or not depends solely on your ability to set the correct expectations and deliver the non-IT part of the service effectively.
Good news is that we are here to help!
But is it smug to believe that you actually need help? When we talked to our partners about cloud adoption the answer surprised even us: not at all and to be honest we’d rather have our weekends back. Truth behind cloud deployments is that the up front investment in time and planning is expensive, messy and clients do not like downtime – forcing IT Solution Providers to execute complex migrations over weekends, holidays and provide ongoing support for unpredictable surprises that always come up.
Truth about the cloud is that the deployment of a cloud solution is 1% technology, 99% proper project management and customer communication. It’s the 99% of the prep work and followup that is keeping most solution providers from seriously taking advantage of the cloud solutions because without help the ability to scale to the cloud is the same as the ability to scale to another inhouse solution.
Over the next two weeks ExchangeDefender is dedicating significant resources to help you navigate what we’re internally calling Napalm Cloud – rapid fire cloud service deployments for Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, ExchangeDefender, LocalCloud, LiveArchive and all the project management, communication and service that goes along with it.
We will be posting several articles, blogs, webinars and guides that we use at ExchangeDefender to deliver our Managed Messaging service in hopes of giving you an idea of how these projects happen consistently, successfully and with a great deal of client satisfaction.
I hope you join us as we discuss these topics because they are of a great importance to your success and profits in the cloud. Money in the cloud will not be made on subscription revenues, the “free” model has effectively assured that, so the greatest opportunity for solution providers is in providing a peace of mind and predictability when it comes to technology – today, tomorrow and years from now.
Can you say that you deliver that? Hopefully over the next two weeks we’ll help you get closer to yes.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
(877) 546-0316 x500
Using LiveArchive to differentiate yourself in the marketplace
Picture this- You get to a prospective client’s site, you go in, you’re prepared, confident you will win the sale, but you come out and no sale. You ask yourself, what went wrong? Was it my presentation? Was it me? Was it them? Was it the pricing? Some business owners may not be willing to tell you why they went with another solution, but knowing why is irrelevant. What you really need to know is how to correctly position the product or service. Once you learn how to do this your chances of losing out in the future will decrease dramatically. To ensure that you have the competitive advantage you will need to stand out from the rest, show your customers you’re unique. Once you help your clients understand that you’re offering something no one else can offer you will make the sale! So how do you convey that to your customers?
Perhaps the most important feature and biggest competitive advantage of ExchangeDefender is LiveArchive. LiveArchive is the business continuity piece of ExchangeDefender. What happens when the client’s server goes down? They are unable to send or receive email. We live in the technological age and majority of business is conducted through email, so no email means loss of business; no one likes to lose money. With ExchangeDefender’s LiveArchive your clients will never have to worry or experience this again. With other solutions your clients would not be able to access their email during an outage, but with ExchangeDefender you are providing your clients access to their emails through LiveArchive, this advantage will set you apart from everyone else.
Another advantage of LiveArchive is that it’s instantaneous. Your clients will be able to resume service automatically and everything will run as it normally would. It’s simple, you just open a web browser to https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com or (https://la.livearchive.exchangedefender.com) and continue where you left off so there is nothing to tweak/install/configure.
Finally, ExchangeDefender’s LiveArchive lets you stand out because unlike our competitors we sync mail, contacts and calendars. We do so for a year so you don’t have to worry about missing critical pieces of information to do your job. This is truly a Business Enterprise solution like no other and that is what will differentiate you from your competition.
Comparatively speaking, nobody else has this service so it’s easy to explain why LiveArchive as a hosted solution makes a giant difference. Another piece of the comparative puzzle is when customers find something they believe is similar, but know this is not an apples to apples comparison. If your client does happen to find a “comparable” solution, make it known to them that other solutions partner with a third party- so what does that mean for them? It means that your client is placing trust in a company that doesn’t trust their company and/or technology so they put it in the hands of a third party. Typically what happens in that case is the solution is purchased and IT Providers and clients come to find out the solution doesn’t work as it should and it happens just when the client is depending on it most. If you or your clients were in a situation like this the last thing you would want to find out is that they’re unable to access their email because their provider’s provider is down.
In addition, LiveArchive is built in with the ExchangeDefender package so unlike your competition we do not charge for basic or extended storage. Lastly, convey to your clients that your solution stands out by offering mail sync. Competing companies do not sync mail back to your server once the service comes back up so you effectively lose mail. Even worse, some don’t give you live access to email while you’re down, they just offer “mail bagging” or “mail queuing” which keeps the mail from being lost but while you’re down – you do not have the ability to send or receive mail.
LiveArchive is just one of the many features that give you the advantage over your competition. For additional tips and selling points, check out these great blogs!
If you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact me directly at: anastasia@ownwebnow.com or 877-546-0316 x 739.
Building a Sales Case for Encryption
If you’re running an I.T. business trying to understand HIPAA compliance as far as email security is concerned, you’re not alone. I.T. shops are scrambling to find solutions for their clients that are “HIPAA Compliant.” But what exactly does that mean? For the most part, HIPAA compliance states that you need a set of policies and procedures in place on appropriate use and safeguarding protected health information or PHI, processes to validate those policies and procedures are followed, and supporting technology to facilitate secure and protected communications. In my opinion, it does a very poor job at defining with any reasonable detail as to “how” to protect PHI in email form. The Privacy Rule requires a covered entity participating in the exchange of electronic protected health information (ePHI) to have in place appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect the privacy of PHI, including practical safeguards to protect against any intentional or unintentional use or disclosure in violation of the Privacy Rule.
Furthermore, the standard for transmission security (which can be read here: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/administrative/securityrule/techsafeguards.pdf) has been updated to enforce the use of encryption. It states that covered entities police themselves in regards to the use of public networks, possess a solution to protect ePHI as it is transmitted, and document that solution. The Security Rule goes on to state that it is perfectly acceptable to transmit ePHI to be sent over a public network as long as it is “adequately protected.”
If you’re not confused yet, I salute you. What I have gathered is that HIPAA = security + training + polices + procedures–all of which “should be” monitored and audited for compliance. It is the equivalent of saying, “You shouldn’t speed because you might get a ticket.” In this case, you should provide some reasonable level of security, train your staff and end-users on said security, create policies and procedures to comply with HIPAA guidelines. Otherwise, that “speeding ticket” can have a minimum fine of simply a warning to a maximum penalty of $1.5 million dollars with the possibility of up to 10 years in prison–depending on the severity of the breach (see: http://www.mcguirewoods.com/Client-Resources/Alerts/2013/2/HIPAA-Omnibus-Final-Rule-Implements-Tiered-Penalty-Structure-HIPAA-Violations.aspx).
It’s my opinion that the goal here is to protect the transmission and storage of sensitive patient data while trying not to impose a decisive method on how that data should be protected. While I am not claiming to speak for any government official; in a way, I believe the government body is saying, “Listen, be smart. Do everything in your power and ability to protect data in transit and the storage or that data. And if we deem there to be a compliance issue, we will weigh that violation and determine a suitable penalty.” While there’s a veil of ambiguity that shrouds the strategy or implementation of ePHI compliance, you have to admire any body of government that takes an approach of flexibility–allowing the entities to take a best practices approach to the technology that is available. In fact, as previously mentioned above, technology (or the security of that technology) is only a piece of the HIPAA compliance equation. However, since is mainly a technology blog, let’s talk about how ExchangeDefender’s Corporate Encryption can help you become HIPAA compliant with your clients.
ExchangeDefender Corporate Encryption highlights four major are of concern with thinking about email security:
• Pattern Matching – Pattern-based encryption that can detect credit card numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth and other account-specific data.
• Lexicon Keyword Matching – Lexicon dictionaries can contain words and word patterns that can trigger encryption mechanisms and protect from data leakage.
• Corporate Encryption Mechanisms – Corporate encryption mechanisms can automatically encrypt messages or forward the contents to the administrator for the corporate review.
• Comprehensive Reporting – Comprehensive reporting of all email activity as well as a Compliance Officer (CO) reporting with search capabilities provide proof of regulatory compliance and simplify reporting.
ExchangeDefender Corporate Encryption provides an easy and seamless way for organizations of all sizes to implement content protection and comprehensive control over information being sent through email. Powered by ExchangeDefender, Corporate Encryption complies with the SOX, HIPAA, SEC and local government requirements for information encryption while providing powerful audit and policy wizards to meet organizations unique goals. We provide all these features without you having to invest in expensive equipment and colocations fees. If you have additional question about our Corporate Encryption service or any of our ExchangeDefender solutions, give us a call at 877-546-0316. We will be more than happy to assist you in building a solid business solution portfolio.
LocalCloud 2.1
We’ve released an update to the desktop version of ExchangeDefender LocalCloud. We’ve spent a few days sifting through bugs reported via (The bug section) @ support.ownwebnow.com for ExchangeDefender LocalCloud and those are the ones we focused on and fixed. Listed below are the hand full of bugs that were isolated and corrected. You can find the most recent version (v1.2), here.
· Fixed an issue that would cause the application to crash upon launch.
o This issue was caused by invalid .ICO files being supplied for branding. Even though it explicitly states that you must provide .ICO files for the Product Icon:, we had users uploading (jpg, gif, png) files.
· Fixed an issue that would prevent files from being deleted from the cloud upon request.
· Fixed an issue that would cause the application to continuously download/synchronize files.
While out team was busy correcting the issues reported for the desktop version of LocalCloud, we finalized our initial Web Version of the file sharing software. The web interface is a slightly trimmed down version of the Desktop Software, for what should be obvious reasons.
The Web Interface Offers, (Fully Integrated – into the admin.exchangedefender.com (USER) control panel.) the ability to view, download and upload files to your personal /shared LocalCloud accounts.
The accounts you have access to will be located in the left panel and their content is located to the right. You can easily transverse through the file structures to either upload or download a desired file. Complete with real time file upload & download status and located at the bottom of the screen is your storage quota. Now you can view & access your files from virtually anywhere.
Changes coming to ExchangeDefender SPAM Reporting
Over the past year you have seen us integrate our suite of communication applications under a single interface in the ExchangeDefender family. We’re making Exchange, ExchangeDefender Antispam, LocalCloud, Web File Sharing, Encryption, Compliance Archiving and Reporting, Web Filtering and even Shockey Monkey come under a single beautiful and seamless user interface. Our clients live inside of an interface that helps them communicate with each other, customers, vendors and outside partners and having bits and pieces of the functionality spread across many platforms is just not an optimal experience anymore.
On September 12th we will be unveiling changes to our reporting, unifying the control panels and creating a full seamless experience across all of our applications. We are extending the experience to the mobile and Outlook plugins so that you can get access to the same information no matter what sort of device or location you are in. It’s what we are working towards.
Email SPAM Quarantine Reports
To understand the necessary changes it’s important to note how ancient some of these ideas are:
When I originally designed email SPAM reports people didn’t live inside of Outlook. There were no iPads or iPhones and the smartest portable device was the 3com Palm Pilot V. Originally the only problem I had was making sure that technically inept people had a seamless way of seeing the junk mail that we quarantined.
We will first unveil the consolidated SPAM Quarantine reports. Email reports were the first technology that gave users insight into what ExchangeDefender was quarantining as SPAM but over time they have not been able to keep up with the more efficient, realtime, searchable and managed reporting we have available on our web site, Outlook plugins, desktop agents, mobile software and so on. While many have moved on from the legacy email reports platform, many have kept the old email reports running in parallel with the new software and for the most part those reports get ignored and just contribute to wasted space and bandwidth for the user.
We have changed the behavior and style of email reports to address this problem. If a user does not review their SPAM reports (doesn’t click on anything) for over 30 consecutive days, the mail reports will continue to flow but will not include the usual full quarantine message listing. They will instead be presented with a link to their ExchangeDefender web control panel where with one click they will have full access to the realtime SPAM data with the ability to read, respond and release messages, manage whitelists and settings.
But Vlad, my clients need access to this it’s the most important part of your solution!
I understand. The email reports are not going away for people that actually use them. But if they don’t use the email report to release a single message in more than 30 days… Let’s face it, they aren’t using them. And if they are only using them to look at stuff then the more optimal experience is through the Outlook Addin or the desktop agent. If we’re mistaken – go ahead and reenable their full reports – but if another 30 days goes without a single message release/whitelist, it will be reset to consolidated message.
We believe this change will address the complaints frequently raised by our clients and our partners about the wasted storage and mailbox resources that go towards SPAM reports that nobody opens. Even worse, users at times look at a SPAM report that is weeks old and attempt to locate SPAM messages that are long gone.
With the new SPAM reports they will have a convenient and quick way to access SPAM quarantines and settings. Furthermore, the system will automatically track their usage and adjust the SPAM reports from Full to Consolidated to make sure we aren’t slowing their experience down. Of course, if at any time the users feel they need more detailed access to the SPAM quarantines we urge our partners to install the Outlook addin or Windows Desktop addin or configure links to the control panel or HTML5 mobile app to give the user full and realtime control over their mail.
In October we will be beta testing native apps for ExchangeDefender as well so I hope we can continue to expand the solution portfolio to our clients both in a way that is meaningful and with the times.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender SQL Balancer Maintenance Window
This Friday, July 19th, 2013 we will be conducting an upgrade, stress testing and DDoS simulation against ExchangeDefender SQL backend, load balancer backend and the overall infrastructure fault tolerance starting at 3PM and ending at 6PM EST.
During the maintenance window mail flow will not be interrupted and mail delivery will not be delayed. Access to email, LiveArchive, mobile services and so on will not be interrupted either. Access to https://admin.exchangedefender.com site, including the ability to make configuration changes or release SPAM, will be interrupted periodically. Again, no email will be lost or delayed.
Following the upgrade our capacity across the core ExchangeDefender network will be increased which will enable us to launch additional services that will be discussed in the upcoming webinar. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes your clients as they may be presented with the message “We are currently conducting routine maintenance, please try your request again in a few minutes”
Scope of the effort
Isn’t this something you could do outside of the peak hours?
Yes, and we routinely make changes and upgrades during the standard weekend maintenance intervals.
For the purposes of this upgrade and an assessment of the new failover systems brought to the new version of ExchangeDefender, we wanted to run a maintenance interval during the peak usage and ascertain both our ability to handle traffic with the brains of the system offline (ExchangeDefender SQL) as well as test geographic redundancy during peak hours.
We felt it was better to have this done at the same time on a scheduled and controlled circumstances than under the unplanned service outage or DDoS.
As I will discuss next week, we have spent a fair amount of money and time upgrading the network not just to be able to sustain excessive outages but also distributed attacks, hacks and so on. We expect to be able to operate the network in a distributed and autonomous environment should we experience massive changes in Internet routing and availability of global networks. If you’ve been paying attention to the news, international government response to NSA espionage, rise in sophisticated hacking and network exploit activity, the reasons and the manner in which we are executing this maintenance window should be self explanatory.
As always, our staff will be available in higher than usual counts so please count on us.
We will also be providing a play-by-play updates as usual via NOC and our @xdnoc twitter.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
877-546-0316 x500