Bureau of Meteorology looks to managed email
Australia's peak weather authority, the Bureau of Meteorology, is exploring outsourcing its email hosting as part of an upgrade from Exchange 2007.
The bureau currently has six servers across two datacentres for 3,080 mailboxes servicing 1,750 users in Australia. At the moment, users don't have an inbox limit, and emails are required to be kept indefinitely.
The agency has sought expressions of interest to help the organisation upgrade from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013 by the end of June 2014.
The agency has said in the documents published on the Australian government tenders website that the physical hardware with the Exchange messaging system and IronPort email gateway system is now ageing, and that the Bureau of Meteorology is looking at how the upgrade can be accommodated.
The proposed replacement would be an external agency managing the Microsoft Exchange system across multiple datacentres hosted in Australia.
"The system will need to cater for corporate email as well as weather alerting, which could result in thousands of messages being sent at a time," the document states.
While all emails will be archived, the agency is looking to implement mailbox quotas along tiers of 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, and over, and is seeking to introduce two-factor authentication for email.
The proposed system would need to be solely supported by the organisation providing the services to the Bureau of Meteorology, the document states.
The authority is accepting expressions of interest until Wednesday, November 6.