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Azaleos Managed Hybrid Service Bridges Gap between Private Cloud Email Infrastructure and Office 365SEATTLE --(Business Wire)-- Azaleos® Corporation, the managed messaging, collaboration and unified communications services company, today announced the second generation of its Azaleos Managed Hybrid Service (MHS), which allows organizations to deploy and maintain centralized control over a blend of private cloud or on-premise and online Unified Communications (UC) capabilities. Azaleos MHS provides monitoring, management, and reporting across both on-premise Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync systems and the Microsoft Office 365 cloud service. Azaleos MHS addresses concerns about keeping critical data inside the firewall by enabling organizations to provision private cloud/on-premise or Office 365 UC services based on the roles and responsibilities and/or regulatory requirements of individual employees, workgroups, departments, subsidiaries, and more. A recent independent survey of IT managers, directors, and CIOs, entitled Cloud Realities in the Age of Office 365, conducted by Osterman Research found that larger organizations are interested in the benefits associated with public cloud Unified Communications, but are concerned about customization, uptime, and security. The survey also revealed that among organizations that said they could not or would not deploy public cloud-based UC services, nearly one third indicated that if hybrid cloud UC solutions were available they would migrate within the next 12 months. A complimentary copy of the survey findings is available here. Filling Office 365 and Active Directory Management Gaps While hybrid architectures that mix on-premise email with public cloud-based filtering, archiving, etc., have been successfully implemented for some time now, spreading mailboxes across private cloud/on-premise and public cloud infrastructures is a new and untested concept. The Azaleos MHS addresses three key concerns facing organizations that want to pilot or move some percentage of their users to Office 365:
Whether an organization chooses a Hybrid private cloud/on-premise environment or a completely public cloud Office 365 implementation, the design, set-up, configuration, and migration process is extremely complex and time-consuming. As one of Microsoft's top 20 Office 365 partners, Azaleos has structured MHS to provide a smooth transition to mixed private cloud and public-cloud-based Microsoft UC environments. One of the key advantages of Office 365 over its predecessor (BPOS) is the ability to provide single sign-on to the cloud service when users log-in to the corporate network. To achieve ths, Office 365 uses federated authentication through a combination of ADFS and on-premise Active Directory. The Azaleos MHS provides set-up (including capacity and namespace planning) and full-time monitoring and management of the Active Directory Domain Controller running ADFS 2.0 to prevent a single point of failure and ensure the continuous availability of single sign-on. Finally, Azaleos MHS unifies management for both private cloud/on-premise and Office 365 environments including monitoring and reporting, management of private cloud/on-premise infrastructure as well as the key attributes required for Office 365 such as ADFS for single sign-on. "Many organizations still consider private cloud or on-premise Unified Communications as their preferred deployment model, but want to pilot Office 365 for some percentage of their users," said Scott Gode, vice president of product management and marketing for Azaleos. "With the Azaleos Managed Hybrid Service, moving to Office 365 is no longer an all-or-nothing proposition. MHS allows IT to finally start making informed decisions about moving to the public cloud in careful and controlled ways. We fill the gaps between private cloud systems and Office 365, while centralizing monitoring and management for both." Leading Hybrid Scenarios Based on the business and technical requirements of an organization, there are numerous drivers for moving to a Hybrid architecture. Below is an abbreviated list of the most common ones. A more comprehensive version is available here:
Active Directory Service for Office 365 For companies choosing to migrate to an Office 365 only environment, Azaleos also announced today an extension to its existing Managed Active Directory (AD) Service and Azaleos Professional Services offering. The expanded AD service now includes ADFS 2.0 monitoring and management to enable and secure single sign-on to domain joined computers. The new Office 365 Readiness and Configuration service provides organizations with a complete assessment and checklist of system and architecture requirements for Office 365 along with set-up and deployment of the required AD and on-premise server technology. Availability Azaleos Managed Hybrid Services are available immediately from Azaleos and its business partners. Pricing Pricing for the new Managed Hybrid Services starts below $10 per user/month (for the combination of on-premise and Office 365 services). Pricing can vary widely based on the type of private vs. public cloud user mix. All Azaleos services can be purchased with All-In-One financing options that wrap hardware, Azaleos managed services, and any deployment and migration services into a single monthly subscription. About Azaleos Azaleos Corporation provides managed email, collaboration and unified communications services available in private cloud, on-premise or mixed deployment architectures. Azaleos' 24x7 managed services for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, Lync, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server improve availability, security and performance, while reducing maintenance time and costs. The patented AzaleosX technology platform enables customers to maintain control over servers and data including their location, while uptime, maintenance, and support is proactively handled by certified experts in its network operations centers. Hundreds of companies from Fortune 500 to mid-market enterprises rely on Azaleos to manage their collaboration infrastructures and address issues before users ever know they exist. A member of the National Systems Integrator program (NSI (News - Alert)), Azaleos is one of Microsoft's top 35 partners in the U.S. and one of Microsoft's top 20 Office 365 partners. For more information visit www.azaleos.com.
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