Firehouse Solutions Partners with Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing Services

Firehouse Solutions is pleased to announce that we have partnered with Microsoft Azure to expand our network.  This partnership will provide all customers with better security, reliability, redundancy, speed, and expandability.  Our team has designed a network infrastructure within Azure (East US) that is load balanced.  This means that we have multiple servers online and can take them offline, one at a time, to perform updates without interrupting website connectivity.  This move will put Firehouse Solutions as close as possible to the industry goal of 99.999% uptime, which is required for critical Fire/EMS operations.

For backups, Microsoft Azure gives us the ability to perform nightly, weekly, monthly and yearly snapshots.  We are looking to update these policies shortly after migration to provide more backup protection.  Additionally, premium disk storage is competitively priced, so we will also be providing additional disk storage for websites and SmarterMail.  Finally, we are exploring options to provide SmarterMail archiving for our customers.  This is a feature that gives your organization comprehensive legal protection since all e-mails sent and received by your organization are owned by your organization, and are properly archived for x number of years.

We plan to switch our mail server over to Microsoft Azure this Saturday night, October 17, 2020 around midnight.  We anticipate less than 1 hour of downtime, however, it could be several hours depending on how well your local internet provider propagates the changes we make.  There will be no interruption in e-Alerts.

For website migrations, we plan to switch them to Microsoft Azure in nightly batches after 10pm starting on Monday, October 19, 2020.  We considered scheduling the migrations, but believe that it is best to keep our nights open in case we run into any issues and need to push any websites further back.  For customers that manage their own DNS (Domain Name System), we will reach out to your website admins for migration scheduling.  We will leave a "Welcome to the New Firehouse Solutions Network" message with a green check mark at the top of your Members Area to indicate that you are running on our new network!  We anticipate all migrations being completed by February 1, 2021.

We have been working hard lately planning and designing these changes.  As always, we are looking for the absolute best and most reliable services and tools for our customers.  Technology evolves and so does Firehouse Solutions.  Please stay tuned for more exciting upgrades!