Office365 for small businesses is a great fit, it just makes sense. A small business doesn’t have the budget for large amounts of storage and infrastructure refreshes. So for a small monthly fee which can go up or down ,small business can use Office365
I don’t mean to sound like a Microsoft salesman here but recently when I was drawing some Visio diagrams for a customer proposal it dawned on me that it does make sense for enterprise customers and I will explain why.
One of the big stumbling blocks for enterprise customers , is the monthly recurring costs.
For example 2000 users on an Exchange P1 plan would cost €7140.00 per month or €85,680 per annum. So any financial controller looking at this will say no way!!!!!!!!!!!!
However nearly all enterprise customers have Microsoft Enterprise Agreements. I am increasingly surprised at how enterprise customers don’t understand the benefits of an EA. There are many benefits but I am just going to list some relevant to Exchange Online.
I don’t mean to sound like a Microsoft salesman here but recently when I was drawing some Visio diagrams for a customer proposal it dawned on me that it does make sense for enterprise customers and I will explain why.
One of the big stumbling blocks for enterprise customers , is the monthly recurring costs.
For example 2000 users on an Exchange P1 plan would cost €7140.00 per month or €85,680 per annum. So any financial controller looking at this will say no way!!!!!!!!!!!!
However nearly all enterprise customers have Microsoft Enterprise Agreements. I am increasingly surprised at how enterprise customers don’t understand the benefits of an EA. There are many benefits but I am just going to list some relevant to Exchange Online.
- Microsoft Planning Service Days: Microsoft can help transition to cloud services through and existing EA Agreement.
- Exchange Core Cal: If you have an Exchange Core Cal , this covers you for an on premise exchange cal and exchange online cal
The image below shows a brief example diagram of a 2000 user company in different geographical locations and using on-premise exchange 2010.
So lets look at some of the costs associated with maintaining and running this on=premise solution.
| Item | Cost |
| Wan Links | Possibly 60k per annum for the 3 sites |
| Storage | How much would the storage cost for 25gb * 2000 users cost. Storage refresh after 3 years may cost 300k |
| Power Consumption | Most likely the exchange server will be running on a virtualisation platform. A rough guess for all 3 sites 50k per annum. |
| Hardware Vendor Support | On the Sans and virtualisation hosts , roughly 30k over 3 years |
| Mail Hygiene | Potentially 50k per annum |
| Hardware Deprecation | New hardware becomes old the minute it is delivered to site. |
| Exchange Admin Staff Cost | Possibly 100k per annum |
| Exchange 2013 | How much would it cost to upgrade this entire organisation to Exchange 2013….. |
| Backup Software | Possibly 10k per annum |
| Backup Hardware | Hardware refresh after 3 years possibly 100k |
So all of the above cost and infrastructure could become like the image below.
So now it starts to make sense, and enterprise customers are licensed to do this right now and probably don’t even realise it!
Exchange Online Features & Pricing
Microsoft Information Protection 