We are at a cross roads today in our company, and i have been reading through the internet a couple of times now :-) for every technical input out there are 500 sales pitches and 500 hosted companies desperate after making money and hogging business.
So i feel like the Technical expertise on the subject is outnumbered at least 1000 to 1.
Our setup today is 45 mail boxes hosted with an external host, the uptime is not great, their support really sucks and they have very bad costumer communication skills, and all issues we report and want fixed has to go to another company that owns the data center.
Administration time is really high having a hosted solution today and our business does have in house staff and equipment to move it internally, management is skeptical.
My main points for moving it in house is skill, cost and flexibility.
We have a big vmware environment and already a test exchange 2013 server running and we have the SAN storage to spare, must email go internally but we also have dual redundant fiber connections in house.
Veeam backup on all servers plenty of onsite and offsite backup storage, the test server is setup with a mail flow to a larger IT company who has a huge Barracuda spam/virus filter box we can utilize for a very low cost.
Basically we have everything we need except licenses to move it in-house, this making the cost savings about 20.000$ per year after year 1.
We have installed the mail server our selves and seems stable and preformance/stress test looks very good. If something where to go wrong we can hire in a exchange specialist for 150$ per hour if ever needed.
Antivirus is covered on the server with Eset since we have a few to spare. we have 18 servers SQL file AD ect redundant HA cluster running.
My biggest concern is the hosted vendor going belly up theese days they are dropping like flies and if that happens ALL DATA could be lost and non retrievable.
What would you do or even how would you address your CEO with this.
Let us know and thanks for your time.