ET Investments
Industry:
- Real Estate
- Finance
Primary User:
- Director of IT
Previous Process:
- Microsoft Exhange 2010
Solution:
- Microsoft Exchange 2016
- New Servers
- Network Security
- Anti-spam
The Root Group analyzed and developed a custom email architecture for a mission-critical business environment at ET Investments, saving them $175k and resolving costly recurring performance and stability issues.
Client
ET investments is a nationwide network and service provider for local real estate title agencies. With 75+ branch locations, they are one of the largest independent title insurance agents in the US.
Problem
ET investments had been running email on Microsoft Exchange 2010, which was beginning to be phased out.
They were experiencing widespread performance and stability issues with their email system, creating great difficulty for employees and clients alike. One of the main causes for this was the server design, which placed the servers far away from most of the clients, resulting in significant delays to e-mail access, particularly for communications handling large attachments (~ 80 MB).
Due to the fact that ET Investments owned numerous companies, they also had to manage over 15 e-mail domains, which further increased deliverability issues. E-mail filters would regularly fail and route legitimate emails (both outbound and inbound) to spam, while also allowing phishing attempts to reach email inboxes.
Perhaps the biggest recurring issue, however, was with stability – ET Investments would sporadically lose access to email altogether as a result of network and server failures. The uncertainty and delays of these outages were creating significant strain on there their business operations and needed to be addressed urgently.
One IT consultant had insisted on migrating all email to Microsoft 365, but this was an extremely expensive solution that would host everything in the cloud, creating additional concerns around information security.
Solution:
Root Group proposed a custom-designed 4-way redundant deployment using Exchange 2016 Database Availability Groups. This design incorporated multiple servers that were hosted across two different datacenters, through which there would be 4 backup replicas of all emails. This system of backup copies and servers would ensure seamless accessibility through any potential server failure scenarios. This architecture also involved a rigorous analysis of the latency introduced in between the hops between data centers. The final design assured the performance levels both for production and recovery, should it be necessary.
A new anti-spam solution was also designed using higher-level Sender Policy Framework settings that much more effectively authenticated the validity of e-mails. This ensured outbound recipients and systems would immediately identify ET Investment emails as legitimate.
Results:
- The total cost for Root Group’s implementation over the 5-year plan will be ~$175,000 LESS than the alternative of migrating to Microsoft Office 365 and hosting all emails in the cloud.
- The end-user experience of email outages has disappeared.
- Anti-spam filters, their e-mail encryption gateway, and data center integrations all enjoy the same stability as a result of Root Group’s implementation.
- Outbound e-mails reliably reach client and prospect inboxes.
- Their IT staff can do patching and maintenance work during the day, without any interruption in email functionality, so they don’t have to create planned outages.
- Overall performance speed increased for typical end-user sending and receiving e-mails by 2x.
- Customer service help desk calls about e-mail issues have gone from a constant barrage to almost zero.
