To contextualize this VMware Cloud Provider Program solution architecture and its design decision points, this paper presents a use case of Rainpole.com, a fictitious organization with 25,000 employees. The employee population is split evenly between the corporate office workers and remote office and mobile workers located in geographically dispersed regions. The IT organization has access to a single on-premises data center capable of housing server and storage hardware. The primary objective of this new architecture is to mitigate this single point of failure for the organization’s messaging system while maintaining control and limiting operational costs.

The company has determined that the average number of emails sent and received per day for each user is approximately 100, with an average email size of 75 KB. Each user will be assigned a 2 GB mailbox. The organization requires a deleted item retention window of 14 days to give users ample time to recover unintentionally deleted emails.