Why Are You Still Running Your Own Email Server?

One of the things I tell customers when doing any sort of architectural consulting, is to identify their most important business systems. Invariably something that gets left off of that list is email. Your email is your most critical system. ERP may run your profit centers, but email keeps it moving.

With that in mind, and given all the security risks that exist in the world (see: Russian hacking scandal, other email leaks of the week) it doesn’t make a lot of sense for most organizations to run their own Exchange environments when Microsoft is really good at it.

I had a discussion with an attorney at a company in a heavily regulated industry recently. The attorney mentioned that after investigating, she determined that the company didn’t have journaling turned on for their Exchange servers. (For you DBAs, journaling is effectively full recovery mode for Exchange—it’s more complicated that, but that is a nice analogy). Given that we are Office 365 customers, I wanted to check the difficulty of enabling this in our environment. I found out, full e-discovery capabilities that integrate with e-discovery systems are as easy as one click of a mouse (and a credit card to make sure you are on the right service level).

Another great security feature that was really painful to integrate with email login is multi-factor authentication. Once again, this requires a mouse click or two, and your credit card. You can even quickly do things like whitelisting your office’s IP address so that your users don’t have to use MFA when in the office.

These features are great, but it doesn’t even cover all the threat protection that Microsoft has built into Office 365 and Azure. You can read about that here, but Microsoft can even protect you from threats like spearphising. (Hi Vlad!) . Just like encryption. Don’t be a news story—just be secure.