Apps4Rent Moves Exchange to Azure to Handle Peak Email Loads

A Connecticut based staffing firm was finding it challenging to manage its in-house dedicated Exchange server. The nature of the business required regular email blasts from the company’s recruiters to their large lists of prospects. The high email traffic flowing through the dedicated Exchange servers in peak hours was creating performance issues and email delays. Quick communication with candidates and clients was extremely important for the business and delays were affecting company reputation. When the staffing firm looked for advice from Apps4Rent, we suggested and later implemented the migration the dedicated Exchange implementation to the Azure cloud, a more elastic environment capable of handling highly variable workloads.

Challenges That Client Faced

A professional services and staffing company with 20 years of experience manages its email workload on a dedicated Exchange implementation hosted on on-premises servers. One of the busiest staffing company serving the financial and insurance industry, they send out copious amount of emails every day. The workforce management tool they have been using requires giving access to more than 150 users on the Exchange instance. Each recruiter uses companywide email lists with over three million prospects. The pipeline gets clogged with autoreplies, bounced mails along with legitimate replies straining the database on the Exchange servers. The firm was aware for the longest time that the heavy workload on the Exchange server was causing them frequent slowdowns in day-to-day business. A new Head of IT decided to find a solution with the help of Apps4Rent who suggested the client to move the dedicated exchange to the Azure cloud.
In the customer’s own admission –

How Apps4Rent Helped Move an Exchange Solution to Azure

Apps4Rent – a 1-Tier Azure CSP reseller and a Hosted Exchange provider for over 10 years with over 10,000 clients, suggested a Microsoft Azure solution to the client.

Apps4Rent’s Microsoft certified Exchange and Azure experts worked together to move the dedicated exchange instance on Azure. We did capacity planning and conceptualized the resource management utilization, recalibrated for the new cloud environment. While provisioning bandwidth, we carried out a cost-benefit analysis to read the impact the ensuing bandwidth changes will create.

We carefully looked into the various transition aspects and connection configurations so that these are not invalidated while moving to the cloud. We carried out myriad compatibility tests on a laboratory server on Azure. We moved the database to the Azure server, which further required us to test compatibility of the existing application storage with Azure storage.

Our experts used the diagnostic API that comes with Azure SDK to identify issues related to event logs, crash dumps, and trace failures. This helped us set up standard monitoring rules to manage applications effectively.

After rigorous testing that continued for three weeks, we successfully managed to migrate the Exchange server to the Azure cloud. This is one of the instances of cloud migration where the Apps4Rent team leveraged the most out of Azure.

Benefits Client Gained

  • De-clutter email flow
  • High availability on cloud
  • Instantaneous resource upgrades
  • No additional hardware costs
  • Fully managed cloud service
  • Increased capacity for email traffic
  • Ability to handle spike loads
  • Over 35 percent cost reduction
  • 24/7 support via chat email and phone

For intelligent management of the large volume of emails in our business, and proactively direct its flow, we needed a server infrastructure that could handle spike loads. Apps4Rent came to us with their deep experience managing tens of thousands of Exchange mailboxes in the Cloud. So when they suggested that we move to Azure, we listened. We made the move!– Bill, Partner, Law Firm, Ohio
Apps4Rent is the most efficient vendor one can get in the market. They do their homework well and are very detailed and meticulous in their approach. They know the intricacies of Azure so well that throughout the migration process they had very little dependency on our internal IT team. Once the migration was complete, we haven’t looked back at it and have been operating without any disruptions, whatsoever!– Jeremy, Head, IT Services, Connecticut

Submit Your Requirements