Why Should You Upgrade to Exchange 2013?

Should we move our email to Office 356? This is surely one question that has bothered you for quite some time now. The fact is that it offers practically unlimited storage and keeps you up-to-date with the latest developments in technology, but what also works against Office 365 is the fact that it can severely restrict your ability to integrate existing business applications and also make you dependent on third party to respond to service issues. And here we haven’t even mentioned the lack of control over the pace of the upgrade. So what is a better alternative? 

Microsoft Exchange 2013 packs in all the advantages that meet the present day needs of any business. If has undergone an evolution in architecture and manageability helping reduce the total cost of ownership, supporting multiple databases per volume and bringing in a single web-based administrative interface. Most importantly it offers you more control that Office 365 would not offer you. So staying with on-premises Exchange is a sound business decision and with Microsoft working on Exchange Online it would be worth the wait. In this article we shall discuss a few benefits of upgrading to Exchange 2013 and also talk about ways in which you can achieve this. 

Simplify the Infrastructure      

         
One notable different in Exchange 2013 over its predecessor is the fact that has simplified infrastructure requirement. It has reduced the number of roles and recommends installing Exchange as a multi-role server. This is a great advantage for small and medium businesses as they can now deploy Exchange on a smaller infrastructure compared to in the past. For instance, if you plan split the Client Access and Hub Transport roles on your mailbox servers Exchange 2013 would facilitate that. 

Make Better Use of Existing Hardware       

   
Reducing the cost of ownership is one of the key elements in any technological development. Exchange 2010 had demonstrated this by reducing disk throughput requirements, allowing you to run it on slow SATA disk storage. This also allowed businesses to maintain virtual environments without straining the resources. Exchange 2013 takes it a step further and introduced features that allow businesses to make better use of the infrastructure. Notable among these are Automatic Reseed features that ease swapping out disks. In simpler terms it allows you to return a substantial amount of storage to the virtual infrastructure. On the front end it means an increase in mailbox quotas without investing anything on storage infrastructure. If your hardware is still due a few years upgrading to Exchange 2013 makes the best business decision. 

Worry Free Environment 

You don’t want to about your email server when you go to bed, do you? Exchange was always conceptualized to run with minimum intervention as long as you adopt the best practices for running it. Making it a worry free too is the inbuilt engine that keeps track of all the events and also performs corrective actions when required. It has introduced a feature Managed Availability that deals with failures. It offers the right set of instructions to external systems such as load balancers that identifies the cause of failure and takes corrective measures to ensure the end users aren’t affected.  

Public Folders Reinvented

There has been talk about getting rid of public folders for quite some time, but Microsoft has reinvented the concept in Exchange 2013. The use of the public folder has though been streamlines and you would no longer need to manage them through the separate Public Folder Management Console. Instead, you will be able to manage it using the Exchange Administration Center or the EAC. This makes them function like regular mailbox databases, allowing administrators to make a part of a database availability group for disaster recovery. The Systems Center Operations Manager, administrators also has been overhauled and the alerts generated by SCOM consume fewer resources on your SCOM servers.

With all these benefits Exchange 2013 offers businesses a number of advantages that are worth the upgrade instead of moving on to a completely new technology.