Financial Services Firms Turn to Azaleos for Remotely Managed E-Mail
9/23/2008
SEATTLE, Wash., Sep. 23, 2008 - Azaleos® Corporation, the managed Microsoft Exchange services company, today announced that iStar Financial, KRG Capital, and Church Pension Group have joined a long list of financial services firms using its award winning Messaging Services. The hybrid remote management services, which maintain e-mail data on the customer’s premise, is increasingly a very attractive solution for the banking and finance sector as a secure alternative to hosted e-mail. This vertical market now represents over 15 percent of the company’s business and is growing rapidly.
Azaleos services enable organizations to preserve an on-premise deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, while off-loading monitoring and management to certified e-mail professionals in the Azaleos network operations center. This capability is especially important in the highly regulated finance sector, where mandates including Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach Bliley, the Security Exchange Act of 1934 and the Anti-Money Laundering statute require companies to institute complicated internal processes to demonstrate that they are protecting customers' and shareholders' privacy and investments.
“IT is the engine that keeps financial services running, so these companies don’t want to allocate precious internal resources for managing their e-mail systems,” said Scott Gode, Vice President of Product Management for Azaleos. “The Azaleos services model is very appealing to the financial sector since their e-mail infrastructure and data stays behind the firewall to meet compliance and reporting requirements, yet it frees IT staffers from day-to-day management, administration, and trouble shooting.”
Azaleos Meets Financial Services Needs
Managed Services provide the benefits of outsourced e-mail without requiring that banks and financial services firms store their data in a third-party data center. Some of the advantages provided by Azaleos over hosted and pure on-premise e-mail alternatives include:
Security & Privacy
“Maintaining e-mail data and systems behind our firewall was a key requirement for us,” said Chris Beach, Vice President of Information Technology for iStar Financial, a publicly traded finance company focused on the commercial real estate industry. “Azaleos allowed us to achieve our goal of outsourcing e-mail management, while keeping physical control over our data and Exchange infrastructure.”
Azaleos' combines remote monitoring and management of Exchange infrastructures that are deployed in the customer’s data center with Azaleos SAS70 certification to keep content safe, secure and on-premise. Meanwhile, the Azaleos ProtectXchange service proactively identifies, isolates, and destroys viruses, spyware, and other web-borne threats, and dramatically reduces the amount of spam.
Compliance Reporting
“Although we wanted to free up our IT staff from managing Microsoft Exchange, we needed the ability to document and report on internal controls, and perform e-Discovery,” said Dustin Jackson, Vice President of Information Technology for KRG Capital, a leading private equity investment firm. “Azaleos was the only solution that met all of our requirements.”
Azaleos ManageXchange provides monthly reports on the status of the managed email system including details on updates, changes, and fixes made by Azaleos personnel. These reports are often necessary and required for various regulatory compliance audits.
To simplify e-Discovery, Azaleos ArchiveXchange maintains a bulletproof and comprehensive record of all e-mail communications that can be easily accessed from a central database. ArchiveXchange also removes the load on the Exchange system to improve performance.
Performance and Business Continuity
“Our business relies on e-mail to get things done, but managing, tuning, and backing up Exchange wasn't a cost-effective use of our internal IT resources,” said Reverend Clayton Crawley, CIO of Church Pension Group, which manages the 136th largest pension fund in the U.S. “Azaleos ensures Exchange is always up and running smoothly, and handles the routine tasks to make sure we can failover and recover quickly in the event of a system outage. Now my IT staff has the time to focus on more strategic initiatives.”
Azaleos ViewXchange and ManageXchange services provide proactive operational monitoring of the end-to-end performance and health of e-mail and related systems by Azaleos' network operations center professionals. To protect against system downtime, the RestoreXchange dual-site disaster recovery service handles both dial tone and mail storage restoration to minimize the impact on employee productivity and business continuity.
About Azaleos
Azaleos Corporation provides the benefits of hosted e-mail and collaboration services for organizations that can’t or won’t allow their data to reside outside the datacenter. Azaleos’ 24X7X365 remotely managed services for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, Office Communications Server, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server keep information on-premise and under IT control, while uptime, maintenance, and support is handled by experts in its network operations centers.
More than 150 companies from Fortune 500 to mid-market enterprises rely on Azaleos and its patented ViewX technology to manage their collaboration infrastructures and address issues before users ever know they exist. Azaleos is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, and one of Microsoft’s top 35 partners in the US. For more information visit www.azaleos.com.
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Editorial Contact:
Marc Gendron
Marc Gendron PR
781-237-0341
marc@mgpr.net
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