Hosted Exchange Compliance for Enterprises

One of several questions enterprise or medical clients ask me often is if our Hosted Exchange solution meets a certain compliance standard. With the move to a new Hosted Platform, accompanied by the data centers those servers are in, we now comply with several standards.

• ISO27001
• Data Processing Agreement
• HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (HIPAA BAA)
• Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)
• Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

The two we're questioned about the most are ISO27001 and HIPAA compliance. It's especially important to medical and credit-card processing organizations to comply to the standards set forth for businesses in those fields. We are always very excited to let potential customers know that we do, and if we host your email, compliance is something you no longer have to worry about.

A good follow up question for any email hosting organization you're considering hosting with is what assurances they can give that they will maintain their compliance standards. This is something often overlooked by someone looking into a hosting option. Because our solution is supported by Microsoft, we can offer more solid compliance assurances than most people. As long as Microsoft's solution maintains compliance, ours will as well. Because Microsoft is such a massive company with world wide deployments that require compliance standards, we are 100% confident in our compliance being maintained. This confidence is also yours to inherit when choosing TH2 as your hosted email provider.

We know every business is different, and with compliance being as complex and vast as it is, we are more than happy to address you specific needs as a business. Getting in touch with us is easy, just email exchange@th2tech.com to get to me, Ricky. I'll work with you to ensure your business meets or exceeds the requirements for security, integrity, and retention requirements to put your email worries behind you.

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Should you have any questions regarding the services offered by TH2 Technologies please be sure to contact them for further information.

TH2 specializes in Orange County IT Support, Orange County IT Services and Orange County Computer Support.

New Services Continued

Last week, I posted about our new Hosted Exchange solution, and if you missed it, you can look HERE. To sum it up, we're offering a better solution that has higher availability than what we are able to offer on our own. In addition to that, I mentioned the flexibility of the service. No one has really asked what that means, but I figured I'd go ahead and talk about it anyway. It's a great question to ask, 'How can a hosted Exchange platform be flexible at all?' It's a good question because on it's own, hosted Exchange isn't any more or less flexible than an onsite implementation, or one hosted with someone else. Where the flexibility comes in is in regards to integration to other online services. The hosted Exchange accounts can and do integrate with several hosted offerings, these include SharePoint, Lync, Office Web Apps, Desktop Office Rights, and Project Online. There are some others that will be far less popular, like SQL database hosting, Azure, and Intune.

What this means to our customers is that if some of you want SharePoint later, we can integrate it into your current offering. That means one account, one console, one point of access, and one bill for all your collaboration and email services. What's more is we can add services on a per user basis. If you have 30 people, but only 10 will use SharePoint, we'll sign you up for 10 licences of SharePoint. The other users won't be presented with the option to access it or asked to upgrade. It's just business as usual for everyone else. The same goes for users that need additional mailbox space or advanced mailbox features like litigation hold or archiving. You can have a few users with these features and the rest of the office on the less expensive option. Finally, if you want to licence Office 2013 through us, we can offer that on a monthly basis as well! This allows your company a lot of flexibility in how to provide any and all services to whatever segments of your user base that you want, without having to deploy or maintain a SharePoint or Lync server for just a few users.

While these are great options, the truth is most of you probably won't really find a good reason to use them right away. That being said, why not sign up for a platform that is both cost competitive and offers these features on demand later down the line? These features aren't going anywhere, but your business is! When your growth finds your needs becoming more diverse, it's as easy as a call to us get that going.

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Should you have any questions regarding the services offered by TH2 Technologies please be sure to contact them for further information.

TH2 specializes in Orange County IT Support, Orange County IT Services and Orange County Computer Support.

Learning and Growing

Fun times at TH2 these past few weeks! We've partnered with Microsoft to offer an even better Hosted Exchange Solution, and we've moved most of our existing customers to the new solution. It's an exciting and affordable solution that offers better availability and compatibility with new features and even other services!

What's really interesting about cloud based Exchange servers is the price point is dropping so drastically it's often more cost effective to host even a small or medium business' mail in the cloud, even if the business already has an Exchange server on site! Let's take a quick look at why this is.

Costs and considerations of managing your own Exchange server:

• Basic Mailbox Management Costs (Time paid to techs to manage mail for your domain)
• Power and Cooling of servers
• Backups - even more costly if Off Site Backup is needed
• Troubleshooting Failures or Service Outages - Can sometimes include ticket costs to get Microsoft involved if the issue is severe enough.
• Yearly Certificate Costs - For secure Anywhere Access to your office Mail Server
• Spam and Virus Scanning and Filtering Service
• Hardware Updates and Maintenance - eventually hardware refresh
• Software Updates and Maintenance - This is Exchange updates and upgrades, including:
• Time to install service packs, updates, potential downtime for reboots
• Upgrading to latest version of Exchange when needed (Features, current system becoming unsupported, etc)
• Configuring and setting up new integrated services when your business grows
  

Costs and considerations of TH2's Hosted Exchange:

• Monthly Cost Per Mailbox
• Initial Project Cost of Migration (One-time fee)

As you can see, there are incredible benefits and potential for savings by letting TH2 manage your mail in the cloud for you. What is most appealing to many managers and CFO's when considering the service is the predictable cost of Hosted Exchange; because TH2 rolls the cost of everything into the monthly mailbox cost, there are no surprise fees or large bills due at renewal times.

So, think it over, and by all means, call us! Ask for Ricky (or email him, exchange@th2tech.com), he'd be happy to rant and rave about the stability and versatility of the service we're offering, and be candid with you about your business' needs and help you to see if Hosted Exchange with TH2 is the way to continue growing your business and bring enterprise class services to the small or medium business level!


Should you have any questions regarding the services offered by TH2 Technologies please be sure to contact them for further information.

TH2 specializes in Orange County IT Support, Orange County IT Services and Orange County Computer Support.

Virtualization, be there or be square

These next few weeks we have something very exciting going on. If you want to talk about the cutting edge of technology for businesses of all sizes, virtualization is it. With so many terms floating around associated with server (or even service) virtualization, it can be a daunting and intimidating thing for small businesses. TH2 Technologies wants its partners to know that as Orange County computer repair techs, we not only understand it, but are making an example of ourselves by transitioning our infrastructure. That’s right, TH2 Technologies is making the switch to a virtualized environment, and we are inviting you to follow our lead!

For those that don’t know, virtualization is a technology that allows a single server to run multiple, separate “virtual machines” or “virtual servers” on one server. These virtual servers are fully functional versions of operating systems, but are allocated only a portion of the “Host” machine’s actual resources. This allows a server to be better utilized by dividing and divvying resources to tasks. This also prevents a business from investing unnecessary amounts of money into brand new servers while still gaining additional resource capabilities!

TH2 is in the process of migrating one of our servers to VMware’s ESXi. ESXi is a “hypervisor”, and once our server is running ESXi, we will be able to add at least 2 more virtual machines. This is allowing our Orange County computer support specialists to run more servers, and better utilize our current resources, without an actual investment in additional hardware! Give us a call, and we can see how virtualization can help your business stand up that extra server you have needed, but just haven’t been able to afford.

TH2 Technologies also offers Orange County computer support and repair services such as:

• Spyware/Malware removal
• Virus removal
• Spam filtering
• Hardware and software troubleshooting
• 24/7 Monitoring
• Drive installations
• RAM Installation
• Desktop repair
• Laptop repair
• Hardware repair
• Software installations