WHATS RIGHT
FOR YOU?
WHY OFFICE 365 IS RIGHT FOR YOU
Office 365 offers businesses the ability to significanly reduce the total cost of ownership by virtually eliminating all costs for hosting and upgrading messaging systems, reducing labor requirements and allowing Microsoft to own responsibility for data center infrastructure and staff. Additionally, Office 365 eliminates the challenges of platform updates and migrations. Microsoft is now a proven cloud vendor that organizations can trust to remain and continually enhance capabilities for the foreseeable future.
WHATS RIGHT
FOR YOU?
WHY OFFICE 365 IS RIGHT FOR YOU
Office 365 offers businesses the ability to significanly reduce the total cost of ownership by virtually eliminating all costs for hosting and upgrading messaging systems, reducing labor requirements and allowing Microsoft to own responsibility for data center infrastructure and staff. Additionally, Office 365 eliminates the challenges of platform updates and migrations. Microsoft is now a proven cloud vendor that organizations can trust to remain and continually enhance capabilities for the foreseeable future.
WHY OFFICE 365 IS RIGHT FOR YOU?
No solution can be all things to all customers. Office 365 was conceived and developed with a consistent Microsoft philosophy; they will provide the core functionality and depend upon 3rd party solutions to fill in the gaps. Similar to Exchange, a 3rd party backup solution is highly recommended to provide protection and, more importantly, rapid, accurate and simple restoration of deleted mailboxes and data.
After all, we backed up mail when it was on premises and nothing should change simply because mail is now cloud hosted. The data still requires backup.
IS IT REALLY
RIGHT FOR YOU?
Office 365 is more than just email. It is a suite of products including document management via SharePoint, personal file storage via One Drive, Collaboration through Skype for Business and Teams and, depending on your subscription tier, can also provide a suite of security mobile and desktop device management tools.
If you haven’t considered Office 365, you should. Office 365 is an effective and robust solution. As of October 2017, there were more than 120 million active business users. The solution continues to be improved and updated and those updates are provided automatically and, typically, without any user intervention or impact.
In most cases, Insentra can provide organizations a primary mail migration for free with a short-term commitment to Backup as a Service. In other words, for less than an organization will spend to migrate to Office 365, Insentra can provide the migration and 12 months of Backup as a Service.
LOWER COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION COSTS
Office 365 can significantly lower the costs associated with providing communication and collaboration capabilities. By minimizing up-front costs, reducing labour costs and potentially lowering ongoing costs, moving to O356 could save you time and money
MINIMIZE UP-FRONT COSTS
One of the most significant ways Office 365 can lower the cost of ownership for communication and collaboration is by eliminating most of the upfront costs associated with deploying new systems. For example, a fresh deployment of Microsoft Exchange or an upgrade from one version of Exchange to another can be an expensive proposition due to the need to purchase servers, appliances, software and the other infrastructure elements necessary to support it. By using Office 365, most of these expenses are eliminated. While much of the desktop and/or mobile infrastructure costs remain, these represent only a fraction of the total cost of ownership for deploying a new system.
“SIMPLY TURN OF REDUNDANT ACCOUNTS… THIS CREATES GREATER CERTAINTY OVER COSTS, BOTH IN THE LONG AND SHORT TERM”
REDUCED IT LABOR COSTS
A primary driver and benefit of Office 365 is its ability to dramatically reduce IT laber costs or, for a more progressive organization, the opportunity to re-assign IT labor to initiatives that provide much more value to the business. While managing servers is a critical business function, provides little value to a business as compared to, for example, integrating secure mobile capabilities for increase security and productivity
“OFFICE 365 HAS THE ABILITY TO DRAMATICALLY REDUCE IT’S LABOR COSTS”
POTENTIALLY LOWER ONGOING COSTS
Office 365 also allows an organization to eliminate most of the ongoing costs of ownership associated with communication and collaboration. For example, an on-premises deployment of Exchange requires periodic upgrades of hardware and software, additional servers or appliances to deal with new threats, and additional storage to address growth. These costs are eliminated when using Office 365 – Microsoft take care of all of these requirements and simply deliver a mailbox as a service.
In addition to the benefits Office 365 provides to growth-oriented organizations, it also provides flexibility to address reductions in staff. Let ’s say an organization has deployed Exchange and the associated infrastructure to support 1000 users, but then must undergo a 20% reduction in staff, the use of Office 365 enables a significant cost reduction by allowing these now redundant accounts simply to be turned off. In a traditional on-premises solution, the infrastructure to support the 200 departed users has been paid for, but now sits idly by. In short, the use of Office 365 provides greater certainty over costs, both in the short term and the long term.
OFFICE 365 VS.ON-PREMISES EXCHANGE
Note: Office 365 Business Essentials for 250 users, Office 365 E1 for other user counts
RAPID PROVISIONING
Another benefit of Office 365 is the ability to rapidly provision new users. A new hire can be fully provisioned within minutes with all the Office 365 capabilities they will need. While this is not atypical for a well-managed, on-premises deployment, Office 365 enables more rapid deployment of a large number of users, as well as users in smaller firms that may not have dedicated IT staff who are proficient in provisioning new users.
INCREASED USER PRODUCTIVITY
Employees can be more productive when using Office 365 compared to an on-premises solution. Greater uptime (at a lower cost) has a direct correlation to productivity. However, the availability of web access and mobile platforms also leads to more productivity.
PROBLEM RESOLUTION AND POTENTIALLLY HIGHER UPTIME
Technical problems always exist in on-premises or Cloud environments. It’s not that Office 365 is built in a way that problems won’t occur such as hardware and power failures, corruption, application faults and other issues.
These issues will always exist. However, the responsibility for addressing these issues and, more importantly, protecting the end user experience from being impacted by them is Microsoft’s. Given the below table of availability of Office 365, it’s safe to assume they’ve become quite adept in this space.
Another important aspect to consider from the table to the left is the cost benefit of using Office 365 to achieve required availability. While many IT departments do a great job at maintaining the uptime of their internal infrastructure, the internal hard and soft costs are high.
This is particularly true for organizations that are able to achieve 99.9% availability. Microsoft is among the leading cloud providers that have invested heavily in robust data center deployments, redundant communication links, data georedundancy, and other carrier-grade capabilities that enable very high uptime.
NO MORE PAIN OF UPDATES AND MIGRATION
NO MORE PAIN OF UPDATES AND MIGRATION
Office 365 eliminates the difficulties associated with regular ongoing maintenance and upgrade requirements. Again, this allows IT labor to be redirected to more valuable initiatives and tasks and, in the case of a smaller organization, eliminates the need and costs of a third party to perform these updates
Perhaps more importantly, Office 365 also enables organizations to avoid the pain of migrating from one version of Exchange and/or SharePoint to another. In the best case scenario, migrating to a new version of Exchange or SharePoint requires significant time and effort. Organizations often wind up skipping versions and supporting dated and insecure platforms
as a result.
BE MORE AGILE
Office 365 simplifies the enablement of remote users whether they’re at home, on the road, or in a remote office. Organizations using Skype for Business gain additional benefit since it enables real time voice communication capabilities in addition to traditional email and calendaring functions. More progressive organizations gain additional significant benefit by taking advantage of the flexibility and agility provided by Office 365 in terms of ‘brick and mortar’ decisions.
An organization of 500 employees may need to provide office space only for 300 staff members, since the majority who are not in the office can be just as productive when working remotely. With facilities accounting for a significant portion of an organization’s fixed costs, this can have a massive impact on the bottom line.
MOST ORGANIZATIONS SHOULD CONSIDER THE USE OF THIRD-PARTY OFFERINGS
Microsoft has remained consistent in their philosophical approach to solutions development. Office 365 is developed and deployed with all the basics of communication and collaboration requirements in mind. However, additional capabilities such as rapid recoverability are left to third party solutions. This is the same approach Microsoft has taken with their on-premises solutions for years. Therefore, we strongly encourage organizations considering migration to Office 365 to consider our Backup as a Service and Reporting as a Service solutions described in more detail on the next page.
OFFICE 365 AND INSENTRA
An important limitation of Office 365 is its lack of a simple and rapid data recoverability capability. The clear majority of data loss is caused by human error. Having the ability to rapidly recover data to the exact time and place it was lost is critical to a user and the business.
Therefore, it is important to maintain a simple and effective backup and recoverability solution for Office 365. Insentra provides an effective and easily consumable solution with our Backup as a Service offering.
While Office 365 delivers all of the above benefits, it would be a mistake to assume that it eliminates all responsibility of your IT department. It is critical to maintain some visibility into the platform that is typically available with an on-premises solution. Insight into Who is accessing the environment, What they are accessing, When a particular action took place, where the access originated, and how users are using (or not using) the applications is critical to maintain security and productivity. Insentra provides a robust managed service that addresses these concerns and enables an organization to get the most from their
Office 365 solution. Insentra provides a robust and effective solution with our Reporting as a Service offering.
If you’d like more information about how Office 365 is right for you, then please enter your details below and one of our consultants will be in touch