Patch Lady – Ignite message to small and medium businesses

Patch Lady here – remember the Soup Nazi of the old Seinfeld show?  “No soup for you?”  Well the message out of Orlando for small and medium businesses  — and perhaps even some large customers that still want an on premise mail server is “No on-premise for you”

Exchange is … for lack of a better term… the back end of the Outlook email client many of you use.  If you’ve ever been near a Small Business Server …that’s Exchange running that email processing for you.  If you use Office 365 now, it’s Exchange running behind that on some big datacenter somewhere.  And for recent years small and medium and even large businesses had the option of going either with cloud based mail servers or setting up an on premise server with a local copy of Exchange.  Now before you ask why… I still know a fair amount of small and medium businesses that even to this day prefer their mail server due to security concerns, access concerns, and subpoena concerns (under the theory that while you can’t dodge a subpoena, you can sure have Attorneys duke it out in a Courtroom and slow down the process a bit.)  You know how that worked out for a certain… uh… yeah, let’s not get into politics shall we?

Jetze Mellema an Exchange MVP was in an Ignite session on Exchange 2019 – the latest release of Microsoft mail server platform where some interesting factoids were announced:

Firstly, Exchange 2019 has a minimum memory requirement of 128 gigs of memory… mind you that’s not for hard drive space …. RAM memory.

Keep in mind that Exchange 2016’s minimum memory requirement was 8 GIG just three years ago.   Granted you never wanted to run Exchange on something that low, but the fact that Microsoft has put in place a 1500% (assuming I’ve done my math right) on paper increase in RAM is a bit unreal.  Is there a tariff on that sucker?

The presenter in the BRK2172 session at Ignite said…. “Exchange 2019 is an enterprise platform for the largest enterprise customers. If you want end-users features, go to Exchange Online”

If you are using Office 365 now, one of the things you want to do and enable is multi factor authentication and disable mail forwarding by default.  I see too many reports of successful phishing attacks that enable silent mail forwarding where the attacker puts in a rule to forward emails and then automatically deletes them so that the phishee never realizes he’s sending outbound emails up the wazoo until it’s too late.

But if you want an on premise mail server?  Better start saving up as you will need a beefier server for sure.