We are in the process of planning a move to Office 365 and we are planning to implement SSO in the process. We have some emails still on Exchange 2003 servers and we have Exchange 2010. We also have various file stores located on premises that need to be moved to SharePoint. I have some concerns with completely moving email and files to the cloud. I am a strong believer in best practices, so of course I believe in having a proper backup solution, especially for critical services and I want them securely located in-house. I don’t want backups hosted in another companies cloud somewhere.
With that basis, I haven’t been able to find any method to properly back up Exchange online. We think that there are several good solutions out there for SharePoint backups but haven’t found any that will reliably back up Exchange online. Having users save their data locally to PST’s and stuff like that isn’t a viable solution. Is it possible to have a hybrid email deployment with all mailboxes stored on Office 365 and have Exchange online replicate that data down to an Exchange 2010 hybrid deployment that resides in-house? I was thinking that I can back up the local Exchange 2010 systems and in doing so, I would be backing up my email system. Also, if I can use a hybrid Exchange 2010 for my backups, will I be able to have multiple mailbox databases to balance the load (across multiple mailbox servers), CAS/HT servers, EDGE servers, etc.?