As with the Microsoft 365 clients, Exchange 365 is also available from the cloud.
The advantage for SMEs in particular is that having their own Exchange server is often not worthwhile. Exchange 365 is an alternative.
The complexity of managing Exchange Server makes it attractive for organizations to purchase it as a hosted service.
Third party provider
This has been possible for more than 10 years with a number of providers, but since June 2018 many providers have been marketing the service as "cloud computing" or "software-as-a-service". Exchange hosting allows Microsoft Exchange Server to run on the internet, also known as the cloud, and is managed by a 'hosted Exchange Server provider' rather than building and deploying the system in-house.
Microsoft Exchange Online is an email, calendar and contact solution provided as a cloud service by Microsoft and our partner world4you. It is essentially the same service offered by hosted Exchange providers and is based on the same technologies as Microsoft Exchange Server. Exchange Online provides end users with a familiar email experience for PCs, the web and mobile devices and provides IT administrators or small businesses and professionals with web-based tools to manage their online deployment. [Microsoft Exchange is available both as on-premises software and as an online version as a hosted service with Exchange Online. Customers can also choose to combine on-premises and online options in a hybrid deployment.
A hybrid deployment can serve as an intermediate step between a local and a fully hosted Exchange solution. This configuration offers a variety of features that allow organizations to better migrate user mailboxes by not only moving local mailboxes to Exchange Online, but from Exchange Online back to the local server, setting up cloud-based message archiving for on -premises mailboxes and centralized mailbox management for both infrastructures, just to name a few.
With the need for on-premises servers; namely an Exchange Server and an Azure Active Directory synchronization server, there is a resource cost to implement a hybrid solution. Hybrid deployments continue to be a popular choice for organizations unsure of the need or urgency to fully migrate to Exchange Online. This also allows for staggered email migration.
Hybrid monitoring and reporting tools cover the on-premises main stack of Microsoft Exchange, Skype for Business, SharePoint, Windows and Active Directory servers and use replica data to report on the cloud user experience. Monitoring servers is important for optimal server infrastructure maintenance as well as cloud reporting to monitor user experience.
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