These “corner cases” typically have unique privacy or regulatory requirements — or it might simply come down to company culture. “That points to something bigger: You’re hosting your own email and managing it a certain way because you’ve always done it that way,” said Kimball.
But that’s typically not best for a business’ users and partners, not to mention its IT staff, who want to be doing more exciting and challenging kinds of work. Enterprises should be focused on staying current, quickly gaining access to the latest capabilities (in Microsoft’s case, think access to Copilot) and the “absolute resiliency” of the cloud, said Kimball.
However, he did question Microsoft’s rather abrupt end-of-service for Exchange Server 2019. In other cases, even after EOL, Microsoft has been known to continue to support legacy infrastructures. “Five years is not a long time to have a product in the market,” said Kimball. “End of support is a big thing.”
