Hosted Exchange benefits to on-premise Exchange servers

NEW YORK, U.S.: Intermedia, the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider specializing in messaging and collaboration solutions, announced two new solutions that extend the benefits of hosted Microsoft Exchange to small and medium businesses (SMBs) who have an on-premise Exchange server.

While SMBs understand the benefits of a hosted solution in terms of uptime and security, many have been unable to make the migration, due to switching pains, licenses or other reasons. For those businesses that can’t yet move to SaaS, Intermedia now brings SaaS benefits to them in the form of hosted anti-virus and anti-spam, as well as hosted business continuity for high availability.

The rapid adoption of hosted Microsoft Exchange is primarily driven by SMBs’ need for secure and reliable email at a lower cost. However, a large portion of SMBs are unwilling or unable to migrate to hosted Exchange at this time and continue to use their in-house Exchange servers. Intermedia’s new Business Continuity and SpamStopper solutions address the needs of this segment.

“Email is a critical part of doing business, and for SMBs who are running in-house mail servers, there is a high risk of downtime and unsecure emails entering the environment,” said Serguei Sofinski, CEO of Intermedia. “Intermedia’s new offerings are designed to address some of the biggest pain points that small businesses face today. Our goal is to provide solutions that enable users to continue their business operations without risking lost productivity.”

Intermedia’s Business Continuity solution is designed to provide the high availability of Intermedia’s hosted Exchange solution to on-premise Exchange servers by allowing SMBs to use Intermedia’s servers to access their email when their Exchange server goes down. Unlike other basic “dial-tone” solutions, Intermedia’s offering is Exchange-based and allows for full access to user mailboxes – including 14 days of email history, calendar appointments, contacts and more.

In the event of a server outage, customers automatically switch over to Intermedia’s Exchange servers and can then access everything through an Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface. OWA provides users with a rich user interface, similar to their experience using the Outlook 2007 desktop client, and is more robust than basic “webmail” clients provided with other solutions.

ContentSync, a proprietary tool built by Intermedia, synchronizes Intermedia’s Business Continuity Exchange servers with its customers’ on-premise Exchange servers, providing customers with always up-to-date access to their data in the event of an outage. The solution requires no hardware or software to install, configure or manage, making it possible for SMBs to have a normally cost-prohibitive high-availability solution at a much more affordable price.

The second part of Intermedia’s new solution set is SpamStopper, a hosted service that provides email filtering, antivirus, antispam and anti-phishing for small businesses that have their own on-premise mail server. SpamStopper detects “bad” emails with a greater than 99 percent rate of accuracy, offers near-perfect spam detection and zero false positives. SpamStopper also includes Zero-Hour Virus Outbreak Detection to shield networks from new malware outbreaks before antivirus updates are available.

Most anti-spam software requires administrators to access flagged emails in an external folder to determine if it they are spam messages. Intermedia lets administrators avoid this time-consuming process by managing the entire process on the back-end from its world-class secure datacenter facilities. All flagged messages are sent to the users’ trash folders where they can choose to sort through them or ignore them on their own time.

“Downtime, spam, viruses and phishing emails all take a toll on small businesses with huge cost implications,” said Sara Radicati, CEO of the Radicati Group. “Comprehensive hosted solutions like Intermedia’s Business Continuity and SpamStopper offer a no upfront investment option for small businesses looking to protect their email infrastructure.”