Thinking about reducing the administrative burden of running Office in-house? Many organizations are considering the benefits of moving to Office 365. So what are some of those benefits? Reduced costs and the ability to use Office tools on mobile devices.
The move will be a paradigm shift for organizations that have traditionally administered Microsoft Office in house. When the bulk of employees’ work moves from file servers to the cloud, there are implications for bandwidth.
Woody Walton, writing on his TechNet blog, documented that moving from Outlook to Outlook Web Access (OWA) requires on average five times more bandwidth.
The other aspect of network connectivity to consider is the number of open connections that Office 365 makes to the firewall for each session. Multiply this by all your users, including those at branch offices, and it’s apparent that you need to plan your migration to Office 365 carefully.
This is true most of all for organizations that backhaul their traffic through a central office. If your network is designed to route all corporate traffic, including traffic from mobile devices, home offices, and branch offices, through a central office and then out to the Internet, the increased bandwidth requirements for Office 365 are of particular concern. Network capacity at the central office should be increased accordingly to prevent this architecture from becoming a chokepoint.
Alternatively, you could consider another architecture that works well for Office 365: Zscaler’s Direct to Cloud Network. Since about 80% of corporate traffic is bound for the Internet (and this is apart from the traffic coming from Office 365), backhauling all that traffic through a central office is inefficient. Zscaler’s Direct to Cloud Network provides full visibility and control for IT while at the same time enabling customers to connect to the nearest of our more than 100 data centers worldwide.
It’s an architecture that makes sense on a number of levels, particularly given the shift to the cloud that’s coming with Office 365.
This week, Zscaler release its own solution for Office 365. You can read more about it here: https://www.zscaler.com/cloud-security/office-365-security.php
