Hosted Exchange

White Paper

How Penta Hosted Exchange Helps Solve IT Challenges

Penta Hosted Exchange is designed to help organizations meet common IT and operational challenges, while still offering the flexibility to meet a wide variety of needs.

Benefits of Penta Hosted Exchange Email

Penta Hosted Exchange was designed for organizations that want to get the benefits of cloud-based email with the robust capabilities of an on-premises Exchange deployment. The service provides the core features of Microsoft Exchange Server, so you and your users get the same familiar and powerful Exchange features that millions of users rely on in their on-premises email systems today.

Cost

Bundled with hardware, software, support, and upgrades, using Exchange in the cloud can provide enterprise messaging at a lower total cost of ownership than on-premises systems. Because it is a subscription service, Penta Hosted Exchange turns large, acute capital expenditures into predictable monthly costs.

Agility

In a fast-paced global economy, you need to adapt quickly to changing business conditions. Because it can scale up quickly, Penta Hosted Exchange provides the tools to respond effectively to changes in workforce size, mergers and acquisitions, and the need to extend email to new parts of your workforce.

Simplicity

Deploying, managing, and upgrading on-premises email infrastructure can be time consuming and complex. With Penta Hosted Exchange, there is often little or nothing to deploy—you simply “turn it on.” Server maintenance, security, and upgrades are included in the service, greatly reducing the burden on IT administrators. At the same time, you maintain control over most of the policies, services, and features that impact your business.

Quality

With shrinking IT budgets, your company may be facing challenges in maintaining the degree of email reliability and availability you need to stay competitive. Penta Hosted Exchange is built for high availability and data redundancy. Advanced Penta data centers meet or exceed a wide range of recognized industry standards. Penta Hosted Exchange provides a 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement that compensates customers if uptime falls below the guaranteed level.

Anywhere Access

Today’s workers are increasingly distributed and mobile, working from more locations and using more platforms than ever before. To stay productive, they need full-featured access to email wherever they go. Today’s mobile workforce is well-served by Penta Hosted Exchange. It delivers anywhere access, enabling users to connect to mailboxes with a consistent experience across PC, phone, and browser. Large mailboxes means your users do not have to waste time cleaning out their mailboxes to make space, or moving email to offline PST files that cannot be accessed remotely. All of their email data is available to them, wherever they go.

The three-screen experience

• PC: Penta Hosted Exchange provides a full-featured Microsoft Outlook® client experience without the need for a VPN connection, including a robust offline experience so your users can be productive even when Internet access isn't available.
• Phone: Mobile access is available from a wide range of devices that connect directly to Exchange via the ActiveSync® protocol. These include Windows Phone®, iPhone, iPad, Android, In the event that a mobile device is lost or stolen, we can remotely wipe the device back to its factory settings to preserve data.
• Browser: Outlook Web Access provides a premium online access experience that matches the look and feel of the full Outlook client.

Enhanced collaboration

Mobile and distributed workers need robust collaboration tools to work together effectively across time and distance. Penta Hosted Exchange provides access to the Global Address List (GAL) to make it easy for people to find and contact one another—even outside contractors or others who need to be in your company directory. Personal and shared distribution lists provide easy ways for people and teams to stay in touch. And, support for shared mailboxes and delegated mailbox access provides flexibility in sharing resources.

Powerful calendaring

Effective shared calendaring is crucial to productivity. Penta Hosted Exchange provides the same enterprise-class calendaring features as Exchange Server, with support for delegate access to mailboxes and calendars, which is essential for executive assistants and others who manage shared resources.

Protection and Compliance

It is vital that you do not lose control of security and reliability as you move email to the cloud. Penta Hosted Exchange provides rich and flexible compliance tools that help enable you to improve and streamline the compliance process.

Penta data centers use the latest hardware and software along with a minimum of “n+1” redundancy across disk drives, network connections, power sources and other components. Data are replicated across geo-redundant data centers, helping to protect against even the most serious local crises. Experts monitor systems around-the-clock and failover systems are tested regularly, with regular third-party certification. Finally, a defense-in-depth security strategy is followed using best-in-class operational processes.

If you have ever reflected on questions such as, “When’s the last time we tested our disaster recovery plan?” and “Are we confident we could do a mass restore of our email data from backup?” you may find that Penta Hosted Exchange provides a higher-level of availability and security than you have today.

Anti-spam and anti-virus protection

Microsoft Forefront® Online Protection for Exchange is included as part of the Penta Hosted Exchange subscription, to help block malware from reaching your users’ inboxes. This is an enterprise-class anti-virus and anti-spam service that uses proprietary anti-spam technology to identify spam while letting legitimate messages through with a high degree of accuracy. Multiple and complementary anti-virus engines help catch email-borne viruses and other malicious code in incoming, outgoing, and internal email messages. This helps protect your organization from malicious content that originates from behind your firewall. All of this is built-in to Penta Hosted Exchange with no configuration necessary to start or maintain the filtering technology.

Simplified Administration

Managing corporate email can be complex. With Penta Hosted Exchange, many of the most time-consuming tasks are taken care of by Penta, including the management of hardware, updates, and upgrades. Additionally, Penta Hosted Exchange delivers a streamlined administration experience, making it easier for IT administrators to configure and manage email services in ways that benefit the business.

Support and service level agreement

When you move your messaging services to the cloud, you will need a service provider that delivers the highest levels of support and stands behind its service level agreements. Penta Hosted Exchange has a commitment of 99.9%+ availability. We can make this commitment because of built-in redundancy throughout the system, including at the data center level, and because of the investments we make in operational excellence. Additionally, support for your IT administrators is available around-the-clock, via phone, web, or email.

Conclusion

The benefits of moving email to the cloud are clear; including lower costs, increased agility, simpler management, and higher-quality services. Penta Hosted Exchange meets these expectations by delivering a wide-range of features and capabilities that support anywhere access, protection and compliance, and simplified administration. With Penta Hosted Exchange, you confidently achieve the benefits of cloud-based email while delighting your users and reducing the burden on your IT staff.