With 50 years of assuring time-critical delivery services, Choice Logistics recognized that its legacy unified communications and messaging environment was too complex to manage, with multiple points of failure. SMX assessed the situation and determined that migrating to a modern, cloud-based environment would provide the needed performance and reliability.
SMX transitioned the system from Exchange Server 2007 and related Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 services to Exchange Server 2010 and Threat Management Gateway 2010 and deployed the Exchange 2010 environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The cloud-based foundation includes Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Exchange, and Lync services.
To keep using a legacy call-center application that relied on Exchange 2007 public folders, Choice Logistics kept one Hub Transport (which handles mail flow inside the organization) on-premises, while moving the rest of its Exchange environment to the AWS Cloud. The cloud environment connects Choice Logistics’ primary datacenter using a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Virtual Private Network (VPN). All traffic (including external Exchange users) is routed through Choice Logistics’ primary datacenter and then to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) by VPN.
The environment runs across two datacenters in the U.S. East Region. Choice Logistics uses security groups to isolate the customer-facing public network, client access servers, and mailbox servers.