Re: Business Continuity
Curious what you mean by this. Rackspace has been managing exchange systems for well over a decade at this point so they obviously have a lot of experience there. I assume they still operate their own data centers in many/most cases?(I know their business has changed quite a bit in the past decade). In this particular situation I would say they are expected to provide service levels associated with mission critical stuff for Exchange. That's what the customers are likely paying for anyway. Just not sure what you mean by "no third party hosted service can". Do you mean that only doing it yourself can you provide true mission critical services? Or do you mean only Microsoft can provide mission critical Exchange?(obviously far from the only mission critical app stack out there) or both or other?
Sounds like Rackspace's communication was poor on this, but taking down everything was a good response assuming they did it right away after they determined it was a security issue.
I'm very much pro on prem for everything, at least everything I know(mostly Linux based and I do infrastructure too). I've been operating mission critical internet facing infrastructure for 20 years(as of March 2023), and non mission critical internet facing infrastructure since 1997.
I don't know Exchange(bulk of my Windows expertise dates back to NT4 era) and I find it interesting that so many self proclaimed Exchange experts/admins advocate using Office 365 over hosting it themselves, I guess MS did a really poor job with that software stack, or the average Exchange expert/admin is an idiot (or both). I remember seeing some cool "time machine" based backup systems for Exchange ~12-13 years ago, backed up stuff in real time and you could roll back to any moment with a click of a button(or at least that was the marketing, never saw it in action). Forgot any of their names. Probably put out of business by Office 365(because there are fewer customers running Exchange) though which from what I understand doesn't have anywhere remotely that ability.
I've never been a Rackspace customer myself, every time I looked at the pricing(last time was 12 years ago) it didn't make sense given what I can accomplish with regular co-location. But there are probably lots of customers that really need their hands held on everything, so probably a good solution for them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
