the importance of continuity in office 365 environments

sponsored by Osterman Research, Inc.

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An Osterman Research White Paper

Published April 2013

SPONSORED BY

sponsored by

The Importance of Continuity

in Office 365 Environments SPON

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2013 Osterman Research, Inc. 1

The Importance of Continuity in Office 365 Environments

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY While 99.9% email uptime is acceptable in some situations, it simply is not good enough for many users and organizations. If you or your organization needs a higher level of uptime, please read on. Email is an essential tool for communications, collaboration and content sharing, and is employed more than all other tools combined to accomplish these tasks. Consequently, email must remain available as close to 100% of the time as possible in order for information workers to remain productive. Unfortunately, email downtime is a fact of life for virtually every organization and carries with it a variety of consequences that range from the annoying to the financially devastating. These consequences include: An often-dramatic decrease in productivity among those who rely on email as a

normal part of their workflow.

An inability to process orders, customer inquiries or other transactions in a timely manner.

Emails that are bounced back to the sender as undeliverable, which presents an

unprofessional image to customers, partners, prospective customers and others. The potential for missing time-sensitive communications or failing to satisfy

delivery deadlines. Users switching to personal email accounts that will bypass corporate security,

archiving and encryption capabilities, possibly in violation of corporate policies, regulatory requirements or legal obligations.

THE GROWTH OF OFFICE 365 Office 365 Microsofts cloud-based email and productivity suite is an important offering by virtue of the fact that it is offered by the worlds largest software company, and is among the most widely used cloud-based email platforms currently available for organizations ranging from small businesses to large enterprises. However, like traditional, on-premise and cloud-based email systems, Office 365 experiences periodic outages that can cause email to be down for anywhere from a few minutes to several hours at a time. What Office 365-enabled organizations need, therefore, is a solution that will maintain email continuity during service outages so that users can continue working as though the outage had not occurred. Office 365, like other leading cloud-based email platforms, is quite reliable, but for organizations that have low or little tolerance for any downtime, an email continuity solution is an important and necessary enhancement. KEY TAKEAWAYS Email is employed by the typical user for approximately 2.5 hours per day, far

more than the telephone, instant messaging and social media.

All email systems including Office 365 experience periods of downtime in which the service is unavailable. In addition to negatively impacting employee productivity, email outages can create security, content management, regulatory, legal and other problems.

Decision makers in organizations that use Office 365 should determine their true

cost of downtime, including not only productivity costs, but also opportunity and other costs.

Email downtime is a fact of life for virtually every organization and carries with it a variety of consequences that range from the annoying to the financially devastating.



Organizations that use Office 365 and that have a low tolerance for any sort of email disruption should implement a continuity solution that will enable users to continue working when the service is unavailable.

ABOUT THIS WHITE PAPER This white paper discusses the important issues related to email and Office 365 continuity and offers recommendations for decision makers to consider as they develop their continuity plans. The paper also provides a brief overview of Mimecast, the sponsor of this paper, as well as their relevant solutions.

THE IMPORTANCE OF EMAIL EMAIL IS USED EXTENSIVELY Osterman Research conducted a survey in January 2013 to determine the importance and use of email relative to a variety of other communications tools. We found that the typical corporate information worker employs email for an average of 149 minutes on a normal workday, significantly more than any other mode of communication, as shown in the following figure. Communication Tools Used During a Typical Workday Minutes Used per Day

Moreover, the typical user sends a median of 30 emails per day and receives a median of 80. This means that during a typical 250-day workyear, each user will send and receive a total of 27,500 emails, or an average of one email sent or received every four minutes 22 seconds (assuming a typical eight-hour workday). It is also important to note that email is the primary file-transport mechanism used in most organizations, despite the growing presence of tools like SharePoint, Dropbox, YouSendIt and various enterprise file-sharing and content management systems. Emails ubiquity, its ease of use, and the fact that it is based on industry standards means that it is a reliable method for sending information and files, at least when the corporate email solution is working properly.

Email is the primary file-transport mechanism used in most organizations, despite the growing presence of tools like SharePoint, Dropbox, YouSendIt and various enterprise file-sharing and content manage-ment systems.



EMAIL IS BECOMING LESS IMPORTANT OVER TIME? HARDLY! Our research also discovered that email is being used more over time. While there have been numerous articles and discussions theorizing the demise of email in favor of tools like instant messaging, social media and the like, we found just the opposite to be true: 42% of those surveyed are using email more now than they were 12 months ago, while only 10% are employing email with less frequency. The balance of those surveyed indicated that their use of email has remained largely unchanged over the past 12 months, indicating that for nine of 10 email users, the importance of email is either not diminishing or is becoming more important as a means of communication, collaboration and content transfer.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF EMAIL DOWNTIME Email reliability whether email is managed using on-premise infrastructure or purchased as a cloud service is dependent on a variety of factors, only some of which are under the control of in-house IT. These include the reliability of the various servers on which email server software runs, the underlying operating system and server software, Internet connections, the power grid, local construction activities, weather, the proficiency of those managing the local or cloud-based data center, the quality of various software vendors patches and updates, and a number of other factors. If any link in this chain breaks, email systems can suffer downtime. An Osterman Research survey conducted during 2012 found that the typical email system in mid-sized and large organizations experiences a mean of 43 minutes of downtime during a typical month, or eight hours 36 minutes of downtime per year. This translates to an uptime level of 99.9% not an unreasonable level of downtime in the context of the Service Level Agreements that many cloud-based providers offer, but still a substantial amount of downtime for an organization that relies heavily on email. It is also important to note that many organizations experience substantially more downtime than the mean we uncovered in our research, as shown in the following figure. Email Downtime During a Typical Month Among Mid-Sized and Large Organizations

Email reliability whether email is managed using on-premise infrastructure or purchased as a cloud service is dependent on a variety of factors, only some of which are under the control of in-house IT.



DOWNTIME IS EXPENSIVE AND IN A VARIETY OF WAYS Downtime in email carries with it a variety of consequences that can vary widely in their short- and long-term impacts on an organization. For example: Reduced employee productivity

If we assume that email users are just 31% less productive during an email downtime incident (based on use of email for 149 minutes per day and a 480-minute workday), a very conservative figure of 30 minutes of unplanned downtime each month for users whose fully burdened salary is $70,000 per year will result in an annual productivity cost of downtime totaling $62.68 per user per year an organization of 500 users will, therefore, suffer productivity loss of $31,340 each year.

Extended productivity loss However, productivity costs can be substantially greater if email is unavailable for extended periods, as can occur during power outages or storms events that are outside the control of on-premise email administrators and cloud providers alike. This might result in productivity loss of 100% if employees go home for the day, resulting in much greater productivity losses than in the example above. Osterman Research conducted a survey in late 2011 that asked email users what they would do during email outages of one hour and eight hours. We found that during a one-hour email outage, 2% of employees would go home to continue working. However, during an eight-hour outage of the email system, 10% of employees would go home.

IT disruption

Unplanned downtime incidents require IT staff to stop doing other work and instead focus on the email emergency at hand, thereby delaying other work. A 2012 survey of mid-sized and large organizations conducted by Osterman Research found that a single, unplanned downtime incident will require a mean of 7.0 IT person-hours to resolve. This means that just one downtime incident per month will require the equivalent of 4% of an IT staff members time simply for downtime resolution.

The impact on mobile users

It is also important to note in the context of downtime mobile users who typically are more sensitive to email interruptions. This sensitivity to downtime and the economic consequences that accompany it are driven by the fact that mobile users often have no viable alternative means of communication if they cannot communicate via email, they are often more pressed for time while traveling, and they have shorter windows in which to communicate (e.g., while on a layover at an airport).

Security and content management risks

When the corporate email system is unavailable, users will often look for alternate means to send time-sensitive or other critical content, including personal Webmail systems, Dropbox or various consumer-focused file-sharing tools. While these personally managed tools are useful and typically work as they are supposed to work, this also means that corporate data is sent without first being processed by the archiving, content filtering, security, encryption or other corporate systems that might be in place. This puts the organization at risk on a number of levels, particularly if the organization is in a heavily regulated industry like financial services, healthcare, pharma, energy or government. This cost is difficult to quantify, since it can result in consequences as diverse as leakage of sensitive corporate data all the way to charges of spoliation of evidence in a lawsuit.

Other consequences

There are several other consequences from email downtime that are difficult to quantify, but no less real. These include loss of corporate reputation when

When the corporate email system is unavailable, users will often look for alternate means to send time-sensitive or other critical content, includ-ing personal Webmail systems.



prospects, customers and business partners receive a bounceback when sending email a prospective customer who sends an email only to have it bounce back might never follow up later. An email outage might prevent a timely response to a proposal, order or answer to a client inquiry and could lead to a significant loss of revenue in the long run.

DOWNTIME IN OFFICE 365 MUST BE CONSIDERED Managing downtime is even more critical for organizations that rely on cloud-based email, since they are wholly dependent on a third party to manage email, maintain its reliability and ensure that email runs as close to 100% of the time as possible. OFFICE 365 DOWNTIME OCCURS PERIODICALLY Office 365 represents the Microsofts latest entry into the cloud-based messaging, collaboration and productivity market after Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and hosted Exchange before that. While deciding on which of the many variants of Office 365 to deploy can be a bit daunting because of the many (and somewhat confusing) options available, it is clear that Microsoft has done quite a good job at creating a scalable and feature-rich platform that can satisfy the requirements of many organizations, including large enterprise environments. That said; and without any intention of denigrating the design, deployment or management of Office 365; the platform does not maintain 100% uptime. As shown in the following examples, Office 365 has experienced several outages in the recent past: February 1, 2013: many users experienced problems signing into their email and

calendar, as well as accessing identity services. The issue took one hour 27 minutes to resolve.

January 30, 2013: some customers using vanity domains were unable to access

SharePoint Online. The issue took four hours eight minutes to resolve. January 29, 2013: an outage in Exchange Online in one data center caused email

to queue as a result of DNS lookup problems and affected timely delivery of email. The issue took one hour 31 minutes to resolve.

January 25, 2013: some users were unable to access SharePoint Online, resulting

in some users seeing a 404 error when accessing their SharePoint sites. The issue took 60 hours 34 minutes to resolve.

January 10, 2013: administrators attempting to add a custom domain to Office

365 could not do so. The issue took one hour 11 minutes to resolve. In addition, Office 365 has experienced a number of other outages since its introduction in mid-2011 as indicated by the following examples: November 13, 2012i: a failure that was the result of a combination of issues

related to maintenance, network element failures, and increased load on the serviceii.

November 8, 2012iii: a failure that was the result of viruses reaching Office 365

email serversiv. September 19, 2012: intermittent errors were experienced in the Office 365

administration portalv.

Without any intention of denigrating the design, deploy-ment or manage-ment of Office 365, the platform is not entirely reliable. Office 365 has exper-ienced several outages in the recent past.



January 24, 2012: a major outage affected Office 365 and other Microsoft servicesvi.

September 8-9, 2011: two outages related to DNS issuesvii. August 17, 2011: a major outage for North American customers related to failed

network componentsviii.

DOWNTIME MAY BE MORE SERIOUS IN OFFICE 365 ENVIRONMENTS THAN WITH EMAIL ALONE While downtime is a serious issue in traditional email environments, it is even more problematic in Office 365 and other cloud-based platforms because of the significant number of services available under the umbrella of the platform. For example, moving from Exchange Online hosted email to the Small Business plan (P1) adds instant messaging, telephony services, video conferencing, file sharing and Web site publishing. Moving to the next level, Plan E1, adds SharePoint intranet services. The next level adds email archiving and hosted voicemail. In short, Office 365 provides a wide range of services that impact a larger number of processes for the typical user. This means that as a customer migrates up the Office 365 ladder of services, downtime will impact a larger proportion of the capabilities that users require to perform their work. While this integration of services can make users more productive, it also increases the importance of the enhanced reliability of, and access to, these services.

CASE STUDY: CORPORATE SYNERGIES GROUP This group employee benefits broker based in New Jersey migrated from on-premise Exchange to Office 365. Although the company had also evaluated a migration to Gmail, the fact that the companys users employed Outlook meant that the use of Office 365 would present fewer challenges. However, the IT decision makers within the company knew that Office 365 had connectivity issues, resulting in email not being available 100% of the time a situation that the companys senior management deemed unacceptable. The company had three fundamental requirements when Office 365 went down: a) no level of downtime would be acceptable, b) the outside world could not know that email was unavailable during downtime incidents, and c) users would need to seamlessly transition to a backup email system very quickly. Corporate Synergies opted to use Mimecast Email Continuity, which went live for the company in May 2012. Although the company has not yet deployed the Outlook plug-in that will make the transition to the backup email system completely seamless during Office 365 downtime incidents (a delay that the company attributes to themselves, not Mimecast), the fact that Active Directory is synchronized with backup email has made the switchover simple and quick when required. Underscoring the ease with which backup email capability can be used, users had received no training at the time of the first Office 365 downtime after Email Continuity had been implemented. However, they were able to click a link in Outlook they had received previously and switch over to the new system in short order.

While downtime is a serious issue in traditional email environ-ments, it is even more problematic in Office 365 because of the significant number of services available under the umbrella of the platform.



PLANNING FOR VERY HIGH AVAILABILITY THE IMPORTANCE OF ESTABLISHING DOWNTIME METRICS A key contributor to the length of unplanned downtime incidents is that native email continuity capabilities are often inadequate. The length of time to detect, diagnose and remediate email downtime is often excessive, leading to email downtime incidents that are longer than they should be. Exacerbating the problem is that quite often end users are the first to notice an email outage, not IT. This adds to the length of time required to resolve downtime incidents, since IT diagnosis and remediation efforts often do not commence until at least 10 minutes after the email system has gone down. In the case of a cloud-based email service like Office 365, remediation would consist of contacting Microsoft technical support via telephone or the Web to determine the anticipated length of the downtime and its cause. SLA, RTO AND RPO In developing the requirements for email continuity, decision makers must determine the level of email continuity that is necessary to meet the needs of individual users and the organization overall. This means that decision makers must focus on three critical issues on which to focus in the context of email continuity: Service Level Agreements (SLA)

An SLA is a formally defined level of service that will be provided for an email system. For example, an email SLA of 99.9% means that an email system will be down no more than 43 minutes per month.

Recovery Time Objectives (RTO)

An RTO focuses on how much time between the commencement of an outage and recovery is acceptable.

Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)

An RPO focuses on the amount of data that can acceptably be lost following an email outage. An organization may determine that it can accept losing a certain number of emails per user following an outage, and so can afford to establish an RPO that follows the outage by a substantial length of time. However, most organizations will likely find it unacceptable to lose a substantial amount of email, and so will want to establish an RPO that extends only to shortly after the outage begins.

While RPO and RTO often are typically focused more on backup technologies than email continuity, many consider them to be important considerations for a recovery capability, as well. Critical factors in determining the RPO and RTO for an organization are the benefits of reducing or eliminating data loss, as well as determining the benefits of speeding up the restoration of email service following an outage. The SLA, RPO and RTO will be based on several factors, including: Specific employee productivity requirements

Organizations whose employees rely heavily on email to do their work will normally be intolerant of downtime, and so SLAs, RPOs and RTOs must be carefully defined.

Legal requirements

Email downtime can create gaps in the content archiving process, causing significant problems for organizations that must preserve email for eDiscovery and other litigation-related purposes. Missing emails can easily lead to charges of evidence spoliation, a damaging problem for any organization involved in a legal action.

Email downtime can create gaps in the content archiving process, causing significant problems for organizations that must preserve email for eDiscovery and other litigation-related purposes.



The processes and systems that rely on email as a transport mechanism Supply chain workflows, revenue-generating operations, call center transactions, and other important processes that rely on email to transport content will require an SLA, RPO and RTO that is quite different than for an organization in which email is used only for person-to-person communication.

Regulatory obligations

Heavily regulated organizations must archive all relevant business records missing emails can create serious problems for these organizations. Minimizing email downtime in these cases may have less to do with bringing communications back online than ensuring that critical business records in email are retained appropriately.

Organizations that rely heavily on email for communications but not for content preservation will require stringent SLA and RTO, but will have less strict requirements for RPO. Conversely, at the other extreme will be organizations for which email as a communications tool is not highly critical, but the content in email is extremely important: these organizations will want to focus heavily on RPO and can focus less on SLA and RTO. The bottom line is that organizations that are highly dependent on email communications and use email as a key repository of business records a growing proportion of industries across virtually all industries must focus seriously on the continuity of email. FOUR RECOMMENDATIONS Osterman Research recommends that organizations undertake four steps in determining their need for high availability in Office 365 environments: 1. Understand the full cost of Office 365 downtime

It is imperative that decision makers understand just how much Office 365 downtime truly costs their organization. For example, in the example noted above, a 500-user organization will lose in excess of $31,000 annually in employee productivity using the conservative estimates noted. However, organizations with more highly paid staff, such as attorneys, doctors, a high proportion of senior executives, etc., will experience much higher employee productivity losses from downtime.

CASE STUDY: PHARMACEUTICALS COMPANY A European pharma company with offices in Europe and the United States has been using Mimecast Email Continuity since Spring 2012. The company was an early adopter of Office 365 and was concerned about the reliability of Microsofts new offering. As it turns out, Microsoft did not deliver on its promised uptime, necessitating the use of Mimecasts solution on several different occasions during 2012. For example, one such incident in December 2012 resulted in Office 365 being unavailable for a period of 10 hours. The company has employed the Outlook plug-in available with Mimecast Email Continuity for its 70% of users that employ Windows XP Mac users simply access a Web site and enter their username and password to access backup email. The company is very pleased with the solution: users can transition to backup email within about 20 seconds of discovering an Office 365 downtime, and there has not be an instance in which users could not find older email on Mimecasts servers.

It is imperative that decision makers understand just how much Office 365 downtime truly costs their organization.



Moreover, there are a variety of other consequences beyond productivity losses that must be considered, including missed deadlines that include financial penalties, lost orders, missed customer inquiries and overall loss of goodwill that result from Office 365 downtime. These costs can dwarf employee productivity losses and must be considered as part of the overall analysis of downtime-related costs.

2. Understand what the Office 365 SLA actually means

While decision makers may be satisfied with the fact that Microsoft offers an SLA for Office 365ix, it is important to note that the SLA may be more limited than some Office 365 customers consider to be acceptable in terms of the protection that it affords them:

The SLA does not apply to factors outside Microsofts reasonable control,

that resulted from Customers or third-party hardware or software, during scheduled downtime, or during beta and trial services (as determined by Microsoft).

Service Credits are Customers sole and exclusive financial remedy for any

violation of [the Office 365] SLA.

The Service Credits awarded in any calendar month shall not, under any circumstance, exceed Customers monthly service fees.

The service credits equal 25% of the service fee only if monthly uptime

drops below 99.9% (43 minutes per month), 50% if monthly uptime drops below 99% (seven hours 12 minutes per month), and 100% if monthly uptime drops below 95% (36 hours per month).

However, the way that Microsoft calculates monthly uptime means that

very high levels of downtime might be experienced by some Office 365 users without triggering the payment of Service Credits. For example, consider the case of a 500-user organization with 400 users in North America and 100 users in Great Britain. If the latter experienced three hours of unplanned downtime in one month and 30 minutes of downtime resulting from scheduled maintenance, but the North American users did not experience any downtime, Microsoft would calculate total uptime for that month at 99.92%. This means that although the British users experienced uptime of only 99.51% during that month, no Service Credits would be paid.

3. Establish a return-on-investment (ROI) for email continuity

Decision makers should conduct an ROI analysis for their Office 365 continuity requirements. For example, if we assume that for a 500-user organization a cloud-based email continuity solution is priced at $4.00 per user per month, the solution will save the organization $100 per user per year, and will enable generation of an additional $25,000 per year because opportunities will not be missed during periods of Office 365 downtime, the ROI will be 213%, calculated as follows:

(Benefits Investment) Investment = ROI

($75,000 in benefits - $24,000 invested) $24,000 = 213%

It is also important to note that it may not be necessary to conduct a complete ROI analysis in every situation. For example, email is absolutely critical to most users and organizations, and so qualitatively defining the benefits of maximizing email uptime may be sufficient for some decision makers to justify deployment of an email continuity solution.

4. Implement the appropriate solution

Finally, decision makers should implement an Office 365 continuity solution that

Decision makers should imple-ment an Office 365 continuity solution that will enable users to continue working with access to live email and an archive of their recent email.



will enable users to continue working with access to live email and an archive of their recent email. Decision makers will want to determine if this access should be through the thick Outlook client and/or through a Webmail client. The continuity solution should also impose only a minimal burden on in-house IT staff for initial provisioning and ongoing administration.

ABOUT MIMECAST Mimecast Unified Email Management for Microsoft Office 365 is a Cloud-based email management solution designed specifically to augment the benefit of Microsoft Office 365 with additional layers of enhanced email security, an independent email archive and backed up by a 100% service availability SLA, email continuity. All enhance the value Microsoft Office 365 or Microsoft Exchange Online delivers to your business. Mimecast provides a highly secure and resilient independent offsite email archive which augments Office 365 across all mid-size and enterprise E plans, and Exchange Online plans 1 and 2. The Mimecast Archive for Office 365 delivers enhanced eDiscovery and compliance archive tools as well as an end user orientated Outlook integration to provide end user security and a real time archive search functionality directly from their desktop. MIMECAST GATEWAY SERVICES FOR OFFICE 365 A rich set of email security and gateway features that empower end-users, reduce administration overhead & complexity, and address compliance needs natively: Specialist AV/AS detection and prevention, supported by our global security

taskforce Configurable and customizable DLP technology enabling simple and complex

options, as well as management workflows Multi-party secure email conversations without additional HW/SW Attachment and document management features for users and administrators Disclaimer management and email stationery Large file sending and receipt management

MIMECAST CONTINUITY SERVICES FOR OFFICE 365 A 100% uptime guarantee to mitigate the risks of data & productivity loss during downtime: Rolling 58 day archive to assist in outage scenarios Fully populated inbox for end users available in browser, web, Outlook,

SmartPhone, tablet Automatic failover to continuity mode users dont know they have an outage Automated notifications to administrators in the event of an outage Text notifications can be sent to users in the event of an outage

MIMECAST ARCHIVE SERVICES FOR OFFICE 365 An immutable email archive which natively addresses compliance and eDiscovery needs, as well as empowers end-users with a bottomless archive, searchable from a browser, desktop, the SmartPhone and tablet devices: An immutable, perpetual archive for all email of current and historic employees Natively supports compliance, eDiscovery and legal hold Empowers end-user productivity with personal archive searches through

browser, SmartPhones, Outlook and tablet devices Pay only for current employees, not historic ones too, and no payment for DLs Can be easily added to Mimecast file archiving to create a compliant archive of all

unstructured data



HOW TO CONTACT MIMECAST UNITED KINGDOM AND EUROPE City Point 3 Old Street One Ropemaker Street St. Helier Moorgate Jersey London Channel Islands EC2Y 9AW JE2 3RG +44 (0) 207 847 8700 +44 (0) 1534 752300 [email protected] [email protected] NORTH AMERICA 203 Crescent Street 301 Howard Street Suite 303 Suite 1300 Waltham, MA 02453 San Francisco, CA 94105 USA USA +1 800 660 1194 (toll-free) +1 781 996 6340 [email protected] SOUTH AFRICA Upper Grayston Office Park Ground Floor, Old Warehouse Building Phase 1 Black River Park South 150 Linden Road Fir Street Observatory Strathavon 2031 Cape Town +27 (0) 117 223 700 (toll-free) 0861 114 063 [email protected]



2013 Osterman Research, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced in any form by any means, nor may it be distributed without the permission of Osterman Research, Inc., nor may it be resold or distributed by any entity other than Osterman Research, Inc., without prior written authorization of Osterman Research, Inc. Osterman Research, Inc. does not provide legal advice. Nothing in this document constitutes legal advice, nor shall this document or any software product or other offering referenced herein serve as a substitute for the readers compliance with any laws (including but not limited to any act, statue, regulation, rule, directive, administrative order, executive order, etc. (collectively, Laws)) referenced in this document. If necessary, the reader should consult with competent legal counsel regarding any Laws referenced herein. Osterman Research, Inc. makes no representation or warranty regarding the completeness or accuracy of the information contained in this document. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED AS IS WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED REPRESENTATIONS, CONDITIONS AND WARRANTIES, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ARE DISCLAIMED, EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT THAT SUCH DISCLAIMERS ARE DETERMINED TO BE ILLEGAL.

i http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-hit-by-second-office-365-email-outage-in-five- days-7000007342/ ii http://cumulusglobal.com/cms/microsofts-apology-says-volumes-about-office-365-outages iii http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-hit-by-second-office-365-email-outage-in-five- days-7000007342/ iv http://cumulusglobal.com/cms/microsofts-apology-says-volumes-about-office-365-outages v http://www.rosebudtech.com/microsoft-office-365/office-365-portal-outage-resolved/ vi http://article.wn.com/view/2012/01/24/Microsoft_Office_365_Hotmail_goes_offline/ vii http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/09/office-365-google-docs-go-down-again-could- give-pause-to-the-cloud-wary/ viii http://www.windowsitpro.com/blog/tony-redmonds-exchange-unwashed-50/office-365/ bad-week-cloud-microsoft-google-suffer-outages-140501 ix Microsoft Exchange Online Dedicated Plans Versions Service Level Agreement (SLA), October 2012

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