Ceryx: High-Availability, Hosted Exchange

Hello,

Our SPAM filters caught a potentially dangerous email announcing a critical patch for Outlook and Outlook express. The message appears to come from Microsoft Customer Support (no-reply@microsoft.com) but a quick look at the header information (or even hovering over the embedded link) will tell you that it’s not from Microsoft.

Do NOT install this update.

While this is a particularly good job of spoofing - the grammar is correct and doesn’t appear to have been run through Babel Fish - this is not from Microsoft. Here’s an excerpt from the original message:

Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721)
Brief Description
Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security. 

Microsoft recommends that all patches should be downloaded from the Microsoft Windows Update site. Go to http://update.microsoft.com (best to type this in directly) and the site will let you know if you need any updates to applications or to your OS.

Thanks,
John

Hello,

We recently published a white paper that should interest anyone who is considering outsourcing email and needs to know more about what options exist in the market. Google, Microsoft and a variety of other service providers all offer business-grade email ‘in the cloud’ but each take a unique approach. This paper examines some of the more obvious differences, such as features and functionality, as well as less transparent implications as it relates to compliance, availability and control.

The abstract is below. If you are interested in reading more, go to the Ceryx website and download the entire paper.  

Cloud computing is the most discussed, least understood yet one of the most eagerly anticipated technologies of the day. It is eagerly anticipated because of the promise to deliver software services to consumers and businesses in a way that will significantly reduce the complexity and cost of running software on site.

As we move along the spectrum and consider outsourcing applications from the simple to the very complex, critical tradeoffs need to be made around complexity and control. This paper will examine some common tradeoffs – citing specific cloud applications in the market – whose impact goes beyond mere technical considerations and whose adoption may introduce legal risk, compromise existing business processes or even eliminate some of the efficiencies that modern  software services promised to deliver in the first place.

Thanks,
John

A few customers have asked us how prepared we are, as an organization, should a larger outbreak of the Flu occur.

We have built much of our organization around contingency plans to safe guard against unforeseen problems like this. Our replication technology, with data centers in two countries, is just one example of how we have built technology to ensure business continuity.

Similarly, we have developed a set of operating procedures that facilitate remote access should employees not be able to make it into the office.

Should illness, inclement weather or any other variable prohibit employees from making it into our offices, we have the ability to securely manage and monitor all our infrastructure remotely - including our phone systems, desktop computers and of course our messaging platform.

Internally we have also established cross-training practices to ensure that should an employee become seriously ill, there is always someone else who is capable of handling the task at hand. Call it human failover.

Fortunately we haven’t had to use these measures in the past couple weeks – everyone is healthy.

Like everyone, we hope this current situation will pass with minimal impact but we want to take this time to reassure our customers that we are prepared for anything.

John

Hello,

We just announced a relationship with IBM that is representative of how we are actively trying to grow our distribution channel and extend our premium hosted solutions to the Enterprise. For more details, click here.  

We expect to be making more of these types of announcements in the coming year as we continue to grow our channel. This strategy allows Ceryx to reach and service a broader market without compromising the attention we provide to our direct customers.  The channel relationship is symbiotic in that we work closely with each organization to build a go-to-market strategy, develop collateral and sales methods specific to their organization, as well as help train their sales force and operations team.

In return, our channel feeds us requirements and customizations that - if demanded - we make part of our general offering.

The net result is a solution that has matured to the point where organizations no longer need to compromise existing business processes or features in order to realize the cost benefits that a multi-tenant, hosted solution provides.

Best,
Richard 

Hello,
At Ceryx we take great pride in our Hosted and Managed Exchange solutions. We have architected our solutions to the highest standard so we can deliver peak performance and availability for our customers. We do this for the portion of the market that recognizes the value of high productivity and understands the cost of latency and downtime that can plague complex, business-grade email systems like Microsoft Exchange.

We believe we can do this - invest heavily in our systems and processes - and still be able to offer great value and be very competitive in the market.

Still, the market is crowded with ‘budget’ providers who offer massive or even ‘unlimited’ mailbox sizes at incredible discount rates. While these solutions may be suitable for casual users, we think it’s important to highlight what these providers may have compromised on, in order to be able to keep their costs low enough and still run a viable business.

All solutions are not built the same. To help clients properly evaluate the different solutions in the market and give them the knowledge to be able to ‘look under the hood’ we recently published a paper that explores some of key areas to explore when evaluating a Microsoft Exchange deployment:

• Architecture - Dedicated or Virtual? Storage Area Networks or Attached Storage?
• IOPS - Is your provider following or improving upon Microsoft guidelines?
• Storage Load - Does your provider provide ‘breathing room’ on the system or packing them in?
• SPAM and Anti-Virus - Is there gateway and backend Anti-Virus?
• Monitoring - Does your provider react to problems or plan for them?
• Mobility - Has your provider built in additional layers of redundancy for BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server)?

If you are interested in learning more, go to www.ceryx.com/availability/ and see how your system measures up.

We hope content like this will help clients make more informed decisions when purchasing outsourced applications. If there are other areas that you would like to see us explore and write about, please send us a comment.

Thanks,
Richard

Hello,

At Ceryx we focus relentlessly on keeping complex applications - like Hosted Exchange - highly available. This is no simple task, particularly in light of some of the issues that plague individual data centers. Many of these issues are beyond the control of the individual facility operator: events such as natural disasters, fires and explosions (where the fire department will not allow the backup generators to run) that are not covered under an SLA and are becoming surprisingly common.

We have commisioned a short White Paper chronicling some high-profile examples of these outages, the causes, effects and finally what Ceryx continues to do with it’s Clustering and Geo-Replication technology to maintain high availability for a service we believe is critical.

If you are interested in the current state of data center readiness, please take the time to read this article (download from our homepage). We hope you’ll find this article interesting. We’ve also included some detailed information about the recent release of our Replicated Exchange 2007 offering and cover some of the new enhancements included, that provide additional layers of redundancy for all our customers.

Mark 

There are a number of hosted Exchange companies making big, lofty announcements about their pending support for the coming release of the 2nd generation iPhone, expected this month.

At Ceryx we will focus on announcing our own innovations and going forward we will be using this blog to chronicle some of features and functionality we’ve build on top of Microsoft Exchange.

However, support for the iPhone is an announcement that should come from Apple. What the latest version will support is ActiveSync - a technology that has been native to Exchange for some time. What’s new is that the iPhone will go beyond providing just POP3 and IMAP support and provide true ‘push’ technology using ActiveSync, with better security for corporations.

And like every other hosted Exchange company, we won’t need to change or develop anything to support this innovation from Apple.

Mark

Earlier I posted an article relating to the difficult relationship between enterprise and the iPhone. Now as a follow up it is necessary to look into the security related issues regarding Apple’s venture into mobility.

Lately there have been a number of articles and sites dedicated to hacking the underlying operating system of the iPhone. Initial attempts were purely for benign reasons of curiosity and (not so benign) unlocking. Both of these feats have now been accomplished and have provided some unexpected results. It seems that Apple, in their rush to get the iPhone to market, neglected to lock down security at the OS level. Worse still, the operating system on the iPhone is not some proprietary device based system, but actually a more-or-less fully functional version of Apple’s OS X!

On the surface this seems fantastic! OS X embedded on a $300 device is an incredible deal! Problems arise however when it becomes apparent just how easy it is to hack these devices. The most evident exploit available presently is related to the fact that all applications on the iPhone are run as Root processes. Essentially this allows any application full access to the entire device immediately upon being exploited.

There are any number of articles around now related to the iPhone becoming a mobile hacking platform however this is not the real issue (any hacker worth his salt probably has at least one laptop anyway). The real problem for the consumer is the privacy of their information stored on the device. For instance, malicious code injected into a website accessed by the Safari browser could gain access to the core functionality of any iPhone. An experienced hacker could then gain access to confidential information such as phone logs and contacts.

From the point of view of a personal user this is bad enough. Thinking of it from an enterprise perspective, the lack of security becomes potentially disastrous! Imagine the CEO of a Fortune 500 company having his call logs, contacts and even private photographs on display for the entire world to see! With this exploit it may even be possible for a hacker to gain control of the camera, snapping photos at inopportune times with the CEO’s own device!

I have the honor of calling myself an Apple fan, user and even expert. I am constantly amazed by the wonders of industrial design created within their walls. That said, for the second article in a row, I have to conclude that although I love the idea of the iPhone, it does not belong in business; at least not until Apple decides to leverage the legendary UNIX security that the device already contains!

Mark

You have seen the convenience of managing your spam quarantine by logging into the Ceryx Customer Center and by browsing your daily quarantine digests, but do you know that there is an even faster and more convenient way of managing false positives for people who are always on the go?

Say hello to CC Checkspam.

Checkspam is a feature of the Ceryx anti-spam solution that allows you to e-mail a command to Ceryx Customer Center to search for quarantined messages and have the messages released and mailed back to you in real-time. This will work from any desktop or handheld e-mail client provided the account you use to e-mail the command is the one registered in the Customer Center.

Suppose for example you are on the road and are waiting for an important e-mail from your vendor, john.doe@vendor.com. You suspect that the message was quarantined but your CC Quarantine Digest is set to be sent at 10 PM everyday and you have to respond to this vendor before 5 PM. It’s already 4:45 PM and you an hour away from your hotel where you can connect to the internet and log in to the Customer Center in order to release the message. All you have is your BlackBerry that is configured with your Ceryx account.

To quickly release the message, compose a new email on your BlackBerry, address it to checkspam@ceryx.com, enter the e-mail address john.doe@vendor.com in the subject line and then send the message. The system receives your message, queries your quarantine for all messages from john.doe@vendor.com and automatically releases all messages found to your inbox.

Checkspam can only search the From field of quarantined messages. It uses the “contains” comparison operator to compare the value in the Subject field of your submission with the From field of quarantined messages. This means the more general the value you submit, the more quarantined e-mail could potentially be released.

In the example given above, you could have put @vendor.com as the subject in your e-mail instead of john.doe@vendor.com and that would release all messages from any of your vendor’s e-mail users.

Because Checkspam uses this implicit wildcard comparison operator, great care should be taken in choosing the subject of your submission. Do not put just an @ sign or a dot as your subject unless you want everything in your quarantine released to your mailbox.

The Ceryx Customer Center, or CC for short, is a web-based application that allows Ceryx E-mail Firewall users to manage their filtering service. With CC, users can write filters to block spam or allow legitimate mail through. CC administrators in addition can create, modify and delete CC accounts as well as view email firewall statistics. For customers who are on the Ceryx Hosted Exchange service, CC version 1.6 is integrated with Exchange to allow administrators to also manage their e-mail service. When an administrator creates a CC 1.6 account, for example, a corresponding Ceryx Exchange account is also created. For more information on what else you can do with CC 1.6, please contact sales@ceryx.com.

Ian

WebReady Document viewing is a new feature in Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access. It allows user to view common file types without the need to have the corresponding application installed on their PC. As a result, the user will be able to view the attachments without saving them to disk or opening them in a locally-installed application.

When the user requests to view certain attachments from Outlook Web Access 2007, it gives user the option to open attachment as a webpage. Exchange 2007 then does the conversion so the user doesn’t need anything but a web browser to view the attachment.

Currently, WebReady Document viewing in Exchange 2007 supports the following types of files:
• .doc (Microsoft Word Documents)
• .dot (Microsoft Word Templates)
• .rtf (Rich Text Format)
• .xls (Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets)
• .ppt (Microsoft PowerPoint Presentations)
• .pps (Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Shows)
• .pdf (Adobe PDF Documents)

By the way, documents created by Microsoft Office 2007 are not supported in WebReady Document Viewing at the moment. This limitation will be addressed in Exchange 2007 Service pack 1.

Willy