I’m the first one to be critical and weigh the downsides of hosted Exchange. The fact that you have no control over your data, or uptime are just a couple. But recently it hit me while fighting with some related issues, three major risks to hosting Exchange in-house, and how Office 365 doesn’t really alleviate them, but at least takes them off your plate.

Being Blacklisted. No longer being able to send email to certain people due to the RBL(Real Time Blacklist) providers putting you on their list. Whoever has had this happen knows what a pain it can be. And especially frustrating if it a false positive.

Having to open https 443 to your server. Hacking and probing has gone up leaps and bounds over the last few years. It’s pretty scary to have to leave 443 wide open to your server in order for OWA and ActiveSync to work.

Keeping security updates perfect. When you do the above, you better be perfect with your Windows Updates and all other 3rd party products. Hackers are probing the Internet looking for vulnerable servers 24 hours a day. Quite often with little effort on their part using automated tools.

So there there are three huge benefits to moving Exchange off-site. However, if you do go with hosted services, you must trust your hosting company has all that covered for you. As there usually isn’t really away for you to audit that.

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs