Azaleos' new hybrid offering

Azaleos' traditional business is remote management of an on-premise Exchange environment. The model provides a nice balance between an on-premise Exchange deployment behind a customer's firewall, including on-premise storage, and the benefits of hosting through Azaleos' remote management of all aspects of the environment.

In early July, Azaleos announced a new hybrid solution for managing email and collaboration services. Azaleos Managed Hybrid Services adds to its traditional offering Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), as well as Exchange Online. This allows Azaleos to offer both its on-premise offering and hosted offering for the same customers. Using two data centers, one in the Seattle area and another in North Carolina, Azaleos monitors its on-premise and hosted customers.

The new offering is a nice mix of on-premise and hosted Exchange management that allows quite a bit of flexibility for a number of deployment scenarios. For example, a company whose IT department requires its headquarters employees to have on-premise messaging but would allow employees in remote offices to use a hosted solution would be well-served by this solution. Another deployment scenario might be that those employees in heavily regulated industries, such as broker-dealers, could be served by an on-premise solution, but everyone else could use hosted services.

Cloud computing is definitely here. Azaleos' new solution offers an easy way to take very good advantage of it for messaging and collaboration services.