How to Survive a Hosted Exchange Cloud Outage

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Joe Panettieri.

When a Hosted Exchange cloud service provider (CSP) suffers an outage, a lot of channel partners and customers can get left in the dark. It’s painful. And there’s nothing you can do until the cloud service is restored. Right? Absolutely wrong.

Rich Forsen, president of Network Depot and one of the minds behind Virtual Administrator, walked Talkin’ Cloud through one potential solution that could keep channel partners — and their customers — productive even if a cloud email service like Hosted Exchange suffers an extended email outage…

How It Works

In Forsen’s case, the solution involves SpamSoap — but I suspect other email security service providers can also act as business continuity platforms during an email outage.  In an email explaining the approach to Talkin’ Cloud, Forsen wrote:  "Basically, the way it works is that the MX records for customer domains point to SpamSoap for mail delivery. Within the SpamSoap interface you then plug in the actual mail server information. This ensures SpamSoap gets a chance to clean up all the mail before it’s delivered, reducing traffic.  It also lets you (if you have an on premise server) lock down incoming SMTP from everything but SpamSoap at the mail server level, thus eliminating most security concerns from random attackers."…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-management/how-survive-hosted-exchange-cloud-outage-really