Exchange Emails Face Blocking

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Microsoft have announced plans to throttle, and eventually block, emails sent from on-premises and hybrid Microsoft Exchange Servers that remain unpatched.

“Persistently vulnerable” servers will receive incrementally stricter controls, beginning with throttling (delayed delivery) up to and including a complete block beyond 90-days, preventing onward delivery to other Microsoft-based email accounts such as those in Microsoft 365/Exchange Online and Outlook.com.

The dramatic move puts yet another large question mark over organisations relying on on-premises Exchange server hardware. While Exchange 2003, 2007, and 2010 are now rare, Exchange 2016 still remains in surprisingly widespread use, and many copies of Exchange 2019 are not regularly patched against known vulnerabilities.

Extra controls will apply to servers that run on outdated or unsupported software or haven’t been patched against known security bugs – to help Exchange admins identify unpatched or unsupported on-premises Exchange servers, and allowing them a chance to upgrade or patch before they become security risks.

Recent times have seen a string of major vulnerabilities against Exchange server – including by the Chinese hacking group Hafnium.

Even in 2023, A simple Shodan search still shows thousands of Internet-exposed Exchange servers, with many still waiting to be secured against attacks targeting them with ProxyLogon and ProxyShell exploits, two of the most exploited vulnerabilities from 2021.

 

For cyber security advice and expertise, please contact our team today.

Microsoft Places Debuted

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Microsoft has announced a new app designed to make it easier to coordinate remote-working and in-office staff.

Dubbed Microsoft Places, the app includes a number of features such as hybrid scheduling, intelligent booking, hot-desk reservation and way finding designed to support companies working in a more flexible way, where staff might only attend the office in person a few days each week.

Hybrid scheduling makes it easy for employees to signal to each other when they plan to work from home or the office, and this allows Microsoft Places to make intelligent recommendations about the best times to speak with people in person. The aim here is to avoid what has been dubbed ‘commute regret’ – visiting the office only to discover the person you need to see is working from home.

With many companies using less office space and more hot-desking arrangements, hot-desk booking allows users to visually map themselves onto a floorpan, picking the best space for their work or coordinating time with colleagues.

Wayfinding has been designed to help colleagues who might attend offices infrequently – guiding them to meeting rooms from their mobile and generally making it easier for companies to adopt shared work spaces.

Alongside the monitoring tools already rolled out to Teams & Viva, Microsoft Places also adds an extra reporting layer that helps companies monitor home and remote working trends, and make recommendations based on those insights.

 

For Microsoft expertise and IT Support, please contact our team today.

Veeam Backup for Office 365 reinvents Backup

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Recently released in beta, Veeam Backup for Office 365 is a curious idea. Remember the old days of email? A physical server in a backroom somewhere sorting your business mail like a private sorting office?

It’s not really hard to see why that setup became redundant: that trusty piece of hardware, with its installed copy of email handling software like Microsoft Exchange or Kerio, was doomed to fail eventually, whether it be from an office disaster or the finite lifespan of hardware.

Then cloud-based services came along and ensured your email was suddenly resilient to real-world dangers. A cloud backup for your Exchange Onsite was dependable, and if backing up into the cloud wasn’t enough, why not just move there entirely? No service has exemplified this virtual shift more than Microsoft Office 365 – placing your entire Exchange (and operating your inbox client too if your prefer) off-site in the cloud, and letting Microsoft worry about the data centre infrastructure, has frequently been the smart choice for both IT strategy and budgets.

For many, the cloud was backup enough, but in larger organisations or those with special regulatory demands on email retention or availability, users are increasingly wary of certain dangers from a wholesale move to the cloud.

Because internet outages aside, the offline copy you have control over is only as reliable as the client laptop of smartphone it’s stored on, and client devices are frequently even more at risk than your old server. Break your device on the same day as your office loses connectivity for any reason, and your email history is suddenly hundreds of miles away.

Enter Veeam’s newest backup product: Veeam Backup for Office 365 – which turns the concept of a hybrid backup upside down to provide something new, in the form of a local backup for Exchange Online.

Backup for Office 365 replicates a backup of your Microsoft cloud-based email and calendars to a server of your choice (a physical piece of hardware if you wish) on specific backup terms. Users can continue operating Office 365’s wonderfully tactile email service from the cloud, knowing that Veeam will provide you an up-to-date local copy your IT team can immediately seize in event of an emergency.

The actual server architecture holding the backup can be physical or virtual (which potentially makes the entire notion of ‘localised’ hybrid backup a bit abstract, but bear with us) so Veeam’s solution is adaptable in the extreme – re-saving your emails wherever you prefer, to any machine with a Microsoft operating system.

The curious thing is that this hybrid inversion actually makes a lot of practical sense, and re-introduces a critical fail-safe role for a traditional ‘on-hand’ server. Veeam’s mission statement, to always provide ‘availability for the always-on enterprise‘ (a focus on constant, utterly uncompromising uptime of IT services and data for businesses that can’t afford any downtime) is demonstrated with a technical obsession to fulfill even the most demanding business continuity planning.

For business continuity and IT contingency planning, contact Lineal today about Veeam Backup for Office 365