Customer Solution Case Study
/ 3D/I Prepares for Hurricane Rita with E-Mail Continuity Solution
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Professional Services
Customer Profile
3D/I provides clients with a full range of architectural, engineering, IT, and project management services. Based in Houston, Texas, the company has more than 500 employees worldwide.
Business Situation
Hurricane Rita was predicted to strike Houston within a week. If the 3D/I data center were destroyed, employees would be cut off from e-mail access, risking millions of dollars’ worth of business.
Solution
3D/I used Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Continuity service to store a month’s worth of company e-mail securely and act as a backup e-mail system.
Benefits
Easy to set up
Easy to use
Provides peace of mind / “With Hurricane Rita heading toward us, the issue changed from compliance to keeping our communications going during a catastrophe. We called Microsoft and said, ‘Let’s deploy this right now.’”
Gerald van Benschop, Information Technology Director, 3D/I
3D/I provides design, construction, project management, and information technology services to clients including the United States government and local school districts. Based in Houston, Texas, the company has more than 500 employees located throughout the United States and internationally. When Hurricane Rita threatened to strike Houston in September 2005, 3D/I had to ensure that its employees could access their e-mail even if its network systems went down completely. The company’s IT director worked with Microsoft to quickly deploy the Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Continuity service. As a result, users at 3D/I had uninterrupted access to the last 30 days’ worth of company e-mail during the emergency. They could conduct business as usual with their clients and not miss out on important contract bids.
Situation
3D/I, headquartered in Houston, Texas, is a design, construction, project management, and information technology firm that provides a wide range of services. Established in 1953, the company summarizes its values (and down-to-earth attitude) with the acronym ICED PIG: Integrity, Collaboration, Excellence, Dedication, Profit, Innovation, and Growth. 3D/I employs more than 500 people both in the United States and internationally.
On September 18, 2005, the NationalHurricaneCenter warned that Tropical Storm Rita, which had just formed in the Caribbean, could hit parts of Texas within a few days. The residents of the GulfCoast, still recovering from the battering they received from Hurricane Katrina a short time before, expected that Rita would bring massive devastation to the region. Rita’s winds reached hurricane strength on September 20 and government officials urged citizens to evacuate the area.
As the employees at 3D/I headquarters prepared to leave, the company’s IT department considered its options. If the hurricane took down the company’s data center in Houston, users company-wide would be left without network resources—the most urgently needed of which was e-mail access.
Gerald van Benschop, Information Technology Director at 3D/I, says, “Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 is a mission-critical application for us. If our offices lost access to e-mail while bidding on projects, we could miss out on millions of dollars’ worth of business during the hurricane. That’s unacceptable.”
In case of an emergency, 3D/I does have a facility to which it can move its IT operations, but that facility was also located in Houston. Hurricane Rita was larger than the entire city, with wind speeds of more than 74 miles per hour. The four major bayous that pass through Houston presented a strong chance of flooding. Given these risks, 3D/I knew that it needed an alternative solution to ensure continued e-mail access during the storm.
Solution
For several months, 3D/I had been evaluating Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services. 3D/I had installed anti-spam software at its e-mail gateway. When technicians monitored its performance they saw that 80 percent of all e-mail traffic coming into the system consisted of spam and other junk mail. Using internal network resources to process this amount of spam reduced the company’s available bandwidth. 3D/I decided that it could improve the efficiency of its network by eliminating spam before it reached the 3D/I e-mail system.
In August 2005, 3D/I switched to the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering service, which routes all of an organization's messages to the Exchange Hosted Services Global Network. Messages identified as spam can be quarantined at the Microsoft Global Data Center for up to 15 days, routed to a specific mailbox, or flagged as spam in the header or subject line and passed along to the recipient.
“At first we were worried because we’d never let another company host something for us that was this critical to our business,” van Benschop says. “But the implementation was pretty easy. With support from Microsoft, we were up and running in less than 45 minutes with no downtime.”
As part of the Exchange Hosted Filtering purchase, 3D/I received other Exchange Hosted Services. One of these was the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Continuity service, an always-on, e-mail continuity and disaster recovery service that safeguards and guarantees access to e-mail for a business and its employees. The service intercepts and makes copies of inbound, outbound, and internal e-mail, and stores those message copies in a 30-day rolling message store. The message store can be accessed at any time by e-mail administrators and end users to recover messages that may have been lost or deleted from an enterprise's primary e-mail environment.
“We’d been evaluating Exchange Hosted Continuity for almost a month. At that point we primarily thought of the service as a way to help us comply with legal mandates regarding e-mail archiving,” says van Benschop. “With Hurricane Rita heading toward us, the issue changed from compliance to keeping our communications going during a catastrophe. We called Microsoft and said, ‘Let’s deploy this right now.’”
Benefits
3D/I employees in the Houston area safely evacuated the city before Hurricane Rita reached land at the end of the week. Some parts of the city lost power and windows were broken in several downtown buildings, but Houston escaped major damage from the hurricane and the 3D/I data center survived intact. Exchange Hosted Continuity gave 3D/I an easy-to-deploy, user-friendly solution to ensure that employees company-wide had uninterrupted access to communications even if the worst had come to pass.
Easy to Set Up
3D/I went from making Exchange Hosted Continuity available to a few IT administrators for evaluation purposes to deploying the service to users throughout the company in less than a week, under stressful and fast-changing emergency conditions. At one point van Benschop had to evacuate Houston for Austin in the middle of the deployment. Once he arrived, he was able to easily pick up where he’d left off.
“I didn’t even have to be in Houston or on my network domain to finish configuring the service,” he says. “I exported a list of e-mail addresses and user names from the Active Directory® service into a spreadsheet. Then I called my technical contact at Microsoft from my hotel room in Austin. She imported the contents of the spreadsheet into the service and we were up and running.”
Easy to Use
The Web-based interface for Exchange Hosted Continuity was easy for users to learn, freeing IT staff from having to perform lengthy training sessions at a time when their energies were needed elsewhere. Van Benschop sent the simple set of instructions he received from Microsoft to his IT managers at the branch offices. They relayed those instructions to the users, and acted as points of contact for questions or troubleshooting.
Because the product’s interface is similar to that of Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access, users were already familiar with the basic navigation of the program. Those users who took advantage of the service in case the hurricane took down the data center in the middle of the workday were able to easily connect and begin sending and receiving messages.
“It’s very intuitive,” says van Benschop. “There wasn’t any special training needed in order to use the product. The users saw where the inbox was right away, and how to create a new message. It was all very friendly and very routine.”
Provides Peace of Mind
Because the Microsoft Global Data Center network is the first stop for all of the e-mail at 3D/I, the company’s IT staff know that business can continue normally even if the Houston messaging infrastructure goes down. Users have uninterrupted access to lines of communication on which millions of dollars’ worth of business depend. With users’ needs being met by the Exchange Hosted Continuity e-mail interface, technicians can devote more of their time and energy to fixing the problem and getting their systems back up and running.
“I think if you’re using Exchange Hosted Filtering, or any other anti-spam service, you should go ahead and ask them for their continuity product, too,” says van Benschop. “Turning that service on makes a lot of sense.”
Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services
Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services (formerly FrontBridge Technologies) offer an easy-to-use way for enterprises to actively ensure the security and availability of their e-mail environment, while instilling confidence that their e-mail processes satisfy internal policy and regulatory compliance requirements. A seamless extension of Microsoft Exchange Server that operates at the Internet-level, the complete line of services includes hosted filtering for active spam and virus protection; hosted archiving to satisfy compliance requirements and internal policies; hosted encryption to preserve e-mail confidentiality; and, hosted continuity for ongoing access to e-mail during and after disasters. Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services provide value to corporate customers by requiring no upfront capital investment, minimizing IT management overhead, and removing incoming e-mail threats before they reach the corporate firewall.
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