UBS leading the industry in public cloud adoption by using Microsoft Azure for global scale, security, to improve business agility, reduce costs and gain a competitive edge.
NEW YORK— April 26, 2017 — The world’s largest wealth manager, UBS, is turning to Microsoft Azure cloud technology to power its digital transformation, aiming to reduce dependency on legacy technology, find new ways to leverage digital channels, and rethink how its businesses and people work.
“Tremendous transformation is taking place in the financial services industry, and technology is increasingly providing a competitive advantage to firms,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president, Worldwide Commercial Business, Microsoft Corp. “UBS is a model of digital transformation in the financial services industry. With Microsoft Azure, the firm receives all the advanced technological and economic benefits of cloud technology. This is underscored by Microsoft’s investments in security, transparency and regulatory compliance, which enable UBS to innovate while doing business all over the globe.”
UBS is currently using Azure to power its risk-management platform, technology that requires enormous computing power, to run millions of calculations daily on demand. The result — speeding calculation time by 100 percent, saving 40 percent in infrastructure costs, gaining nearly infinite scale within minutes — means the firm can have more working capital on hand and employees can make quicker, more informed decisions for their clients.
“Increasing the agility and scalability of our technology infrastructure is crucial to the bank’s strategy,” said Paul McEwen, UBS Group Head of Technology Services, who is responsible for the entire Infrastructure Platforms Strategy and Support, driving the strategic planning for the bank’s intersection of business and IT needs. “With Microsoft Azure, we are building on the industry’s leading cloud platform in terms of innovation, technology, security and regulatory compliance, which is very important as a Swiss financial institution.”
Key to UBS’s move to Azure was a significant focus on regulatory compliance. Microsoft’s Financial Services Compliance program — a unique program that allows firms and regulators to deeply examine Microsoft cloud systems, services and processes — provides transparency into Microsoft cloud operations. This ensures UBS and regulators that Microsoft has taken the proper steps to secure data and mitigate risk. In addition, Azure’s industry-leading compliance portfolio ensures UBS can move to the cloud while meeting current compliance requirements, as well as plan for future regulations.
In terms of UBS’s strategic journey to the cloud, the risk platform is just the first step. UBS is actively partnering with Microsoft for opportunities to move more business applications to the Azure cloud.
Microsoft continues to see strong cloud adoption from the financial services industry, with more than 80 percent of the world’s largest banks and more than 75 percent of the global systemically important financial institutions using Azure. This represents the highest bar for legal, compliance, security and acquisitions teams.
The announcement was made at Microsoft’s Digital Difference event in New York City. Additional news and stories can be found at www.microsoft.com/digitaldifference. Follow the conversation on social media using the hashtag #DigitalDifference.
About UBS
UBS provides financial advice and solutions to wealthy, institutional and corporate clients worldwide, as well as private clients in Switzerland. The operational structure of the Group is comprised of our Corporate Center and five business divisions: Wealth Management, Wealth Management Americas, Personal & Corporate Banking, Asset Management and the Investment Bank. UBS’s strategy builds on the strengths of all of its businesses and focuses its efforts on areas in which it excels, while seeking to capitalize on the compelling growth prospects in the businesses and regions in which it operates, in order to generate attractive and sustainable returns for its shareholders. All of its businesses are capital-efficient and benefit from a strong competitive position in their targeted markets.
UBS is present in all major financial centers worldwide. It has offices in 54 countries, with about 34% of its employees working in the Americas, 35% in Switzerland, 18% in the rest of Europe, the Middle East and Africa and 13% in Asia Pacific. UBS Group AG employs approximately 60,000 people around the world. Its shares are listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Mitchells & Butlers boosts service with managed mobile platform
Mitchells & Butlers wanted to deploy iOS, Android and Windows devices that run service-enhancing apps to its staff at 1,600 establishments. Before doing so, it needed a mobile device management framework to remotely manage 15,000 devices. The company subscribed to Windows Intune, integrating this with Microsoft System Center 2012 R2. Using the devices and apps, it expects to improve customer service, increase site managers’ efficiency, and reduce costs.
Network Assessment & Technology Roadmap
To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Case Study: Urban Refuge
Microsoft teamed up with Urban Refuge to bring urban refugees in Amman, Jordan, access to local assistance opportunities via a Xamarin cross-platform mobile application. Urban refugees make up 78% of the 655,000 registered Syrian refugees in Jordan and 66% of refugees worldwide. Evidence from the field shows this population has access to mobile devices, yet largely share information via word of mouth. Urban Refuge's mission is to enable access to aid by leveraging technology to address information asymmetries in the urban refugee experience.
Throughout the week here on our blog, we’ve highlighted many ways that Microsoft is working—through our staff and with our business and nonprofit partners around the world—to bring our tools and technology to bear in addressing some of the most pressing global challenges, such as increasing access to clean and affordable water, food and energy for people around the world.
Nowhere are those challenges more acute than in the world’s cities, where increasing population is placing a greater strain on limited economic and environmental resources and forcing cities to operate with greater and greater efficiency. It is forecasted that by 2050 more than 6 billion people, about 70 percent of the global population, will live in urban areas.
At Microsoft, we know that efficiency drives sustainability, and that by working closely with cities and partners we can develop technology-driven solutions to help communities cope with increasing strains on their resources. A few years ago, I was fortunate to work on our CityNext program—a program designed to help cities better manage their infrastructure. Through CityNext, our company has helped local communities cut costs and reduce their environmental impact by optimizing their city operations and transforming their management of key resources.
In Washington state, for example, Microsoft worked with Accenture and the City of Seattle to equip buildings with smart systems that helped improve energy conservation. Through the use of sensors and cloud technology, public buildings send energy consumption data to cloud-based reporting portals, allowing building managers to more easily monitor energy use, identify potential waste and make educated adjustments to improve energy efficiency. It’s a broader application of the same technology solution Microsoft developed to manage its own energy use at our 88-acre campus in Redmond, Washington.
In Finland, Microsoft worked with the City of Helsinki bus team and our tech partner CGI to develop a smarter transit system. We utilized the city’s existing warehouse systems to create a cloud-based solution for the collection and analysis of travel data. The city was then able to leverage this data to reduce its fuel costs and consumption, increase travel safety, and improve driver performance. These efforts also helped the city’s bus system compete for riders in a market already crowded with private vendors because of its enhanced efficiency.
In addition, in China Microsoft Research Lab Asia created a mapping tool called Urban Air that allows users to see, and even predict, air quality levels across 72 cities in China. The tool leverages big data and machine learning to provide real-time, detailed air quality information, to help inform local decision-making by both residents and governments. Citizens can easily check outdoor conditions via a mobile app that is used about three million times per day. And governments can use the data to figure out where traffic or factory production is causing the most pollution, and then take steps to help mitigate it.
Our work with cities and local communities continues to evolve as new opportunities arise. As we wrap up Earth Week here on Microsoft Green, we want to highlight a few recent examples of how our company and its employees are supporting local sustainability efforts in cities such as Chicago, Boston and San Francisco.
Chicago
In Chicago, Microsoft is helping the city design new ways to gather data and properly utilize predictive analytics in order to better address water, infrastructure, energy, and transportation challenges. Last fall, City Digital kicked off a pilot program to create an underground infrastructure mapping (UIM) platform that generates, organizes, visualizes, and stores 3D underground infrastructure data to help inform city planning.
Boston
In Boston, Microsoft is working to help spread information about the variety of urban farming programs in Boston, and the potential of AI and other technology to increase their impact. Microsoft’s Aimee Sprung is a member the Board of Overseers at Boston’s Museum of Science and recently spoke on a panel about “The Future of Your Food.”
San Francisco
In the Bay Area, Microsoft is working closely with our partner Athena Intelligence to use their data processing and visualization platform to gather valuable data about land, food, water and energy in order to improve local decision-making.
Companies in Korea and India choose Microsoft Azure to fuel their digital transformation
As written on blogs.microsoft.com
Driven by strong customer demand for cloud computing, we continue to invest to deliver an intelligent, global and trusted cloud for our customers. In India, Flipkart – the country’s leading marketplace – and Tata Motors, as well as Korean companies LG Electronics, Asan Medical Center and Samsung Electronics, are all leveraging the scalability, availability and resiliency of the Microsoft cloud to enable their digital transformation.
I’m pleased to share that Azure is generally available from two new cloud regions in Korea, part of 38 Azure regions announced across the globe – more than any major cloud provider. With 13 of those regions in Asia, customers across the region can take advantage of the Azure cloud platform’s global scale, reliability and advanced intelligent services. They can also benefit from local datacenters to achieve higher performance and support their requirements for data location and replication.
In Korea, hundreds of companies are adopting local Azure services across industries including finance, manufacturing, retail, health care, gaming and telecommunications. For example, LG Electronics is sending real-time data and leveraging the scalability of virtual machines to gain insights and better serve thousands of customers. Asan Medical Center is driving an immense big-data collaboration with millions of anonymized clinical notes to provide industry and academia with opportunities to analyze medical data using Microsoft’s hybrid cloud as a critical foundation.
Other Korean companies are leveraging the global scale of the cloud to power Internet of Things (IoT) solutions including Samsung Electronics, which is using its remote energy reduction solution, S-Net Cloud, to monitor energy use and deliver efficiencies to save its customers up to 30 percent in energy costs.
In September of 2015, we opened datacenter regions in India, providing the massive computing power of the Microsoft cloud to fuel growth and innovation. Earlier this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Flipkart has adopted Azure as its exclusive public cloud platform to enable its continued growth and expansion, and to scale quickly and to stay resilient, especially during peak seasons. The move marks a first step in a broad collaboration between the two companies to provide 100 million Flipkart customers with the best online shopping experience. Flipkart will use Azure Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics capabilities to optimize merchandising, advertising, marketing and customer service. This partnership comes on the heels of our cloud collaboration with Tata Motors – India’s leading auto manufacturer – to provide connected driving experiences with Azure.
Sustainable success: zero-waste manufacturer grows business with Windows 10
When Megan and Marshall Dostal started making glycerin-based soap from recycled cooking oil, they thought they might have a niche business. By believing in their product and playing to each other’s strengths, they built a successful and sustainable company called Further Products. Now, Further Products uses Windows 10 and Surface Pro 4 devices to help it stay connected, impress customers, grow the business—and make the world a little healthier.
Megan and Marshall Dostal want to live their lives more or less like everybody else. They just want to use fewer natural resources and generate less waste. An earnest and dynamic couple from South Pasadena, California, the Dostals have turned that perfectly healthy impulse into a successful, innovative business they call Further Products. The company recycles used cooking oil to make sustainable glycerin-based personal care and cleaning products.
In 2008, to run their used Mercedes-Benz, Marshall Dostal started making biofuel in the couple’s garage from waste cooking oil. The process produces glycerin as a byproduct, so Marshall learned how to make it into soap. When they sold some at a trade show, the Dostals thought they might have a promising niche product. “Like something you might sell in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead show,” Marshall jokes.
But the Dostals believed in their idea and worked hard to create a great product that’s time may have come. Today, Further Products recycles waste oil from restaurants all over southern California to make biodiesel and glycerin. It uses the fuel in the company vehicles and purifies the glycerin to manufacture a full line of hand soap, lotion, fragrance oil, candles, and cleaning products that it sells to some of the best retailers, top restaurants, nicest hotels, and biggest property management firms in the country.
The Dostals use Windows 10 and Microsoft Surface Pro 4 devices to stay connected, impress customers, and grow their business. “When I show up for a sales call at a new restaurant, I’m that woman who makes soap from grease,” says Megan Dostal. “Then I bring out my Surface Pro to show them how Further Products will work for them, answer their questions on the spot, and prove to them that we are for real.”
Two people and a lot of moving parts
The Dostals did not know much about starting a business, so they just split the work according to each other’s strengths. Marshall manages production, supply chain, vendors, inventory, distribution, and billing. Megan works on product development, marketing, social media, and communication with customers.
“I'm either working at home or on the go, and Marshall is at the warehouse,” says Megan. “We need high-level technology that is simple to use and helps us stay connected with each other all day.”
In 2015, the Dostals began working with two Surface Pro 4 devices running Windows 10 and two subscriptions for Microsoft Office 365. They both use the tools in Windows 10 and Office 365 to schedule meetings and tasks, create presentations, keep notes, manage business processes, and touch base with each other from anywhere on almost any device. They both like the versatility of the Surface Pro device with detachable keyboard, touchscreen, and Surface Pen.
The best world
Marshall had always used Macs, but he made a seamless transition to Surface Pro 4 and Windows 10. “In laptop mode, Surface Pro has the power and the programs I need, and in tablet mode, I can take it into the warehouse and start counting inventory,” says Marshall. “It’s the best of both worlds, and I’m not tied to my desk.”
If Megan is giving a presentation and doesn’t have a ready answer, she will often send Marshall a quick email or instant message. “He usually responds with a PowerPoint slide or an Excel spreadsheet that I can add quickly to the presentation,” she says. “I love it.”
Megan and Marshall use the Microsoft Edge web browser to research online, download information, or access social media. With just a touch, Megan sets Sticky Note reminders to stay on top of calls and meetings, and the Cortana digital assistant talks her through her busy day. She can use the Surface Pen to write on the tablet screen or actually mark webpages with the inking feature. She also likes Windows Hello facial recognition because it makes signing in to her device fast and easy, and it impresses customers.
“Windows 10 saves me time all day,” she says. “I can toggle between the four different things that I'm constantly doing at the same time, and I like to know that only I can open it.”
How to fuel success and support growth
When Megan and Marshall chose Windows 10 and Surface devices, they introduced portability, mobility, and easy remote collaboration to their already effective working relationship,
“Windows 10 helps us combine our different skill sets and streamline everything we do,” says Marshall.
With the mobility and versatility of their Surface devices, Megan and Marshall can work with and build relationships with a network of vendors, restaurants, and other local businesses. That helps Further Products maintain quality and consistency and helps the Dostals keep up with their growing business.
“I just grab my Surface and I’m on my way with everything I need for that next meeting,” says Megan.
The Dostals like to say that biodiesel fuels their vehicles, glycerin fuels their product line, and Windows 10 fuels their business. “Further Products offers a beautiful personal care experience that people can feel good about,” says Megan. “With Windows 10, we can be authentic, and still responsive enough that our customers know we don’t cut corners to run our business.”
As Further Products has grown from small eco stores to fashionable boutiques, famous restaurants, hotels, and major office buildings, the Dostals have noticed that sustainability is no longer on the fringe. “People almost expect sustainability now, and the more awareness grows, the bigger Further Products gets,” says Megan. “And when a restaurant, hotel, or other business puts a Further Products sign in its bathrooms, our zero-waste story becomes their story.”
“We are proof that you can turn any idea into a big idea,” adds Marshall, “if you don’t compromise on your product—or your technology. As Further Products continues to grow, Windows 10 will be with us every step of the way.”
The Mediterranean Shipping Company has been under the same family leadership since its inception 43 years ago, and while the company now manages its fleet of 480 vessels from offices in 150 countries, it’s fair to say that its caring, corporate culture is as strong today as it ever was. But while we all feel connected to a large corporate family, unfortunately, our IT systems did not support that connectivity, or the global communications that we needed to compete in today’s digital economy.
Container shipping has evolved over the years to become a commodity-based business. Today, we are facing an era of shrinking profit margins and a growing pressure on the revenue side. Yet we were able to ensure that IT played its part in minimizing operational expenses, while improving our business services to employees. That’s because Office 365 delivers a cost-effective, cloud-based solution to bring everybody up to the same level of mobility and productivity across our global operations.
When I became CTO in 2005, we wanted to replace the disparate business productivity solutions we had running in 480 offices around the world with a single digital workplace for everyone. After evaluating other web-based solutions, including Google Apps for Business (now G Suite) and Amazon Web Services, we chose Office 365 cloud-based communication and collaboration services to empower all employees with the same leading-edge, yet familiar business tools. Security also played into this decision: we had various security solutions in place across our global offices, and it took a tremendous effort to ensure that everyone achieved an acceptable standard of security practices. The beauty of Office 365 is that we are deploying Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection as a single security control for all our offices. This service addresses the latest attacks that can invade a network through email attachments or embedded links. In the end, we benefit from the Office 365 constant update model and uniformity of service, plus the added bonus that Microsoft takes care of running the service in the cloud on dedicated hardware.
Today, we use Office 365 to boost mobility and productivity to differentiate our personal service from that of our competitors. The faster we share information and collaborate on behalf of our customers, the more responsive our service. This was a significant challenge before, with so many different solutions in place around the world. Now our employees access their files anywhere from online storage, IM colleagues for quick answers to questions, or spontaneously invite their team members to a video conference. When we have the same easy connectivity across the hall, or around the world, we can make good on our promise to provide global service with local knowledge. And now that regional managers are benefitting from easy-to-use data analytics and dashboard tools to decide what’s best for their customers, we can provide more informed local service.
Mobility is especially important to enable the flexible service our customers have come to expect. Today, our employees are no longer bound to a specific device. Now that people can be more productive on their own terms, we expect efficient turnaround of information among colleagues and with our customers.
Microsoft Consulting Services was invaluable in the deployment of Office 365—it complemented our small, yet nimble IT team and helped us transform how the company works on a daily basis. Despite the variety of legacy environments in place across our offices, we achieved the migration in just nine months. And with our recent subscription to add 17,000 seats of Office 365 E5, we expect a similar rapid adoption of the latest advances in cloud telephony and Office Delve, which delivers personalized content from all your Office 365 apps. At the end of the day, providing a rewarding workplace with a state-of-the-art business productivity platform reaffirms our corporate culture of encouraging long-term employees in a supportive environment—and also gives us a competitive edge where we can work leaner and more efficiently to preserve our profit margins. That’s great business value!
Craft Brewer Reduces Costs and Increases Availability with Hosted Messaging Solution
New Belgium Brewing is the third-largest craft brewery in the United States. Founded in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1991, the brewery produces 29 varieties of beer and distributes across 26 states. About 1/3 of the company’s nearly 400 employees work at remote locations, so New Belgium deployed a Microsoft Unified Communications solution to ensure that employees have the latest capabilities without sacrificing reliable, available service.
Situation
New Belgium Brewing was founded in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1991 by husband and wife team Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan after Lebesch traveled through Belgium on a brewery tour and came home inspired. He named the company’s flagship beer, Fat Tire, for the fat tires on the mountain bike he rode to tour the European villages that inspired him to begin brewing beer. Employee owned, New Belgium Brewing emphasizes ecologically friendly practices. Today it is the third-largest craft brewer in the United States. New Belgium produces 29 varieties and more than half a million barrels of beer per year, which is distributed across 26 states.
Of its 385 employees, about one-third work at locations across the United States as sales people, field quality specialists, and event coordinators. New Belgium relies heavily on a Microsoft unified communications solution to keep its workforce connected. For messaging, it recently upgraded to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 on-premises, and it uses a third-party product for spam filtering. It also deployed Exchange Unified Messaging so that employees can receive and manage both voice mail and e-mail messages in a unified inbox.
New Belgium also recently upgraded its collaboration and document management solution to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Its company intranet, known as “the Mothernet,” is built on SharePoint Server technology. Through the Mothernet, employees can access company information, project sites, cross-team sites, document libraries, and company wikis. They can also collaborate on projects and documents in real time.
For communications, New Belgium plans to upgrade to Microsoft Lync Server 2010, which provides enhanced versions of the communications capabilities provided by Office Communications Server 2007 R2—presence, instant messaging, robust conferencing, and enterprise voice—in addition to improvements in topology, deployment, and management tools. It also plans to use Lync enterprise voice as its primary voice solution. “We have used some version of Microsoft enterprise voice since Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007,” says Travis Morrison, Senior Systems Administrator at New Belgium Brewing. “We had it connected to our Cisco Call Manager. With Lync Server, we plan to retire our private-branch exchange telephony system and use Lync enterprise voice.”
Although New Belgium was happy with the way its unified communications solution helped to keep employees connected to each other, it still saw room for improvement in the areas of availability, storage, and reliability for its messaging solution. Some employees who work in production do not have dedicated computers to access email; New Belgium wanted to provide an easier way for them to manage email. Employees who use email on a daily basis have mailboxes with a size limit of about 7 gigabytes (GB), and as the company grows, its messaging solution requires more storage on its storage area network (SAN). Finally, New Belgium wanted to ensure that its remote employees could always access email, even in the event that the corporate servers were unavailable.
Solution
To complement its current on-premises messaging solution, New Belgium decided to consider a cloud-based email service. It joined the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program to evaluate Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 combines the familiar Office desktop with the next generation of cloud-based communication and collaboration services and includes Microsoft Exchange Online, which is based on Exchange Server 2010 technology. New Belgium wanted to understand how Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2010 would work together in its environment to help it reduce administration and increase availability for its employees. “We feel very comfortable moving our messaging solution to the cloud with Microsoft, because we feel like it is a very mature, stable service with all the latest capabilities,” says Morrison.
With Exchange Online, New Belgium can ensure that remote employees have access to their email as long as they have access to a computer or mobile device with an Internet connection, because Microsoft guarantees 99.9 percent uptime. “A third of our workforce is remote, so fault tolerance and high availability are things we have been expanding. As a smaller IT shop, we have looked for ways to facilitate that,” says Morrison.
With a hybrid solution, New Belgium can move mailboxes to Exchange Online at its own pace. It will begin by provisioning mailbox accounts for production workers in the cloud. New Belgium used Office 365 Directory Sync to maintain user and group configuration information between its on-premises environment and Office 365. The brewery also deployed Active Directory Federation Services to enable single sign-on, so that employees could maintain a single set of credentials. The IT staff can perform administrative tasks for both the online and on-premises environment through the Exchange Management Console. “Email is not where my time as an administrator is best spent,” explains Morrison. “With Office 365 and Exchange Server 2010, I can manage on-premises and off-premises mailboxes through a single console, which is very efficient.”
For employees without a dedicated computer, New Belgium will create kiosk subscriptions, so that employees can manage email through Outlook Web App on any computer with a broadband connection. Morrison explains, “Office 365 was intriguing to us because of the licensing model for kiosk workers versus [the licensing model] for office workers. [We] can provide kiosk workers who do not have a dedicated work area with the full functionality available in Exchange 2010.” They will have 500 megabytes (MB) of email storage available in the cloud, and they can also access many of the same capabilities as employees who use the Microsoft Outlook 2010 messaging and collaboration client.
“One of the things we have struggled with is mailbox size growth,” explains Morrison. With Exchange Online, remote employees with dedicated computers who use email more frequently will have larger mailboxes with 25 GB of storage in the cloud, and they can manage email and voice mail through Outlook Web App or the Outlook 2010 client. Whether their mailboxes are on-premises or in the cloud, employees share the same email domain name and can view the same global address list. They can also view each other’s calendar and free and busy data. In addition, they can move messages into a personal archive for long-term retention. They can easily search both their inboxes and their archives when they need to find something. “What we like about the larger mailboxes and the personal archive capability is that we can both reduce the amount of storage on our SAN and let employees manage their own email rather than applying more IT policies,” says Morrison. In addition, they can use Conversation View, which groups together messages from a single conversation, so they can quickly and easily identify the most recent messages, view the chain of responses, and see a preview of each response in a conversation when they open individual messages. With MailTips, employees are automatically alerted—before they click the Send button—whether a message recipient is out of the office, an attachment is too large to send, or a distribution list contains external recipients.
Because of the interoperation between Lync Server 2010 and Exchange Online, employees can continue to see rich presence information through Outlook Web App or Outlook 2010. They can also start chat sessions with available colleagues, and they can escalate to a voice call or online meeting with a single click of the mouse.
Benefits
By implementing a hybrid messaging solution with Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2010, New Belgium can better address the needs of its employees without sacrificing any of the unified communications capabilities they need to do their jobs. Production workers will have ready access to email through kiosk computers, and it can ensure that remote employees have stable, reliable service. It can also reduce costs and reduce administration.
Helps Reduce Costs
With Office 365, New Belgium can easily provision accounts for new employees in the cloud, so as the company grows, it can avoid additional software and storage costs as it adds people. In addition, after it has moved most of its mailboxes to Exchange Online, it can guarantee email availability without taking on the additional cost to maintain the solution on-premises. It can also retire its third-party spam filtering product. “It costs us a considerable amount to guarantee 99.9 percent uptime for our Exchange servers,” says Morrison. “With Exchange Online, we can reduce those costs, and we gain time to perform other tasks.”
New Belgium can also reduce hardware costs as it transitions more mailboxes to the cloud, because its on-premises solution will require fewer servers. Because most of the messaging data will be stored in the cloud, it can also reduce storage costs because the solution requires less storage overall. For messaging data stored on-premises, it can use less expensive SATA disks.
With Exchange Online, New Belgium can also ensure that employees have access to the latest technology without incurring the cost of upgrades that might require more hardware or storage. “We like to be on the leading edge,” says Morrison. “With Office 365, we will always have the latest version. We do not have to worry that cost will prohibit us from giving employees access to the latest capabilities.”
Reduces Administration
As New Belgium transitions to the cloud, it can gradually reduce administration tasks. “Because we can rely on Microsoft to manage maintenance for our mailboxes in the cloud, we can spend our time working on business projects instead of managing email servers,” says Morrison.
The IT staff especially appreciates the larger mailboxes and the personal archive in Exchange Online. “Because we will not have to worry about storage, we can allow people to manage their own email,” says Morrison. “For us, it alleviates the headache of enforcing quotas and applying policies.”
Enables Scalability
When New Belgium adds new employees, no matter where they are located, it can quickly provision new accounts. “Planning for growth is much simpler with a hosted service,” says Morrison. “We can add people without having to worry about whether we have enough licenses or storage to support them.”
Increases Availability
For its remote employees, New Belgium can ensure that service will be consistently available. With Exchange Online, it can expect disaster recovery through continuously-replicated, geo-redundant data centers that are third-party certified to international standards. The brewery can also take advantage of premium antispam and antivirus protection, 24 hour a day, seven days a week IT-level phone support, and a financially backed, 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement.
Contact us Today!
Chat with an expert about your business’s technology needs.
UBS taps Microsoft Cloud to power business-critical tech
The Mediterranean Shipping Company has been under the same family leadership since its inception 43 years ago, and while the company now manages its fleet of 480 vessels from offices in 150 countries, it’s fair to say that its caring, corporate culture is as strong today as it ever was. But while we all feel connected to a large corporate family, unfortunately, our IT systems did not support that connectivity, or the global communications that we needed to compete in today’s digital economy.
